Under Bombardment in Yemen, Civilians Voice Terror and Despair Online
Version 0 of 1. While Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington offered an upbeat assessment this week of the air campaign in Yemen led by his nation, calling it “very, very successful,” civilians living under bombardment for more than three weeks expressed terror and despair in messages posted online. International aid agencies estimated on Friday that more than 1,000 people had been killed in the past month. Dramatic evidence of the scale of the destruction — shared on Twitter by Mohammed al-Asaadi, a political activist in Yemen’s capital, Sana — showed missiles leveling a presidential palace in the southwestern city of Taiz. Residents of Taiz reported heavy fighting on Friday between army troops supporting the country’s Saudi-backed president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who has taken refuge in Saudi Arabia, and an alliance of Houthi rebels and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. From the early hours of Friday, and continuing throughout the day, residents of Sana reported that the intense bombardment there was taking a psychological toll. Dispatches from the southern city of Aden, where supporters of a southern separatist movement have taken up arms against Houthi rebels, also painted a grim picture of residential neighborhoods turned into war zones. Among the fighters there were some residents of the central district of Al Mualla who took up arms against the rebels from the north. Watching from afar, Mohammed Albasha, the spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, shared images of the destruction of his home city, Taiz, on Twitter. |