At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City,  visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, More

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At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City,  visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, More

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Iman Saleh (with drum) on hunger strike  in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen; seated next to her is Rep. Ilhan Omar. Photo: Hassan El-Tayyab.

Since March 29^th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course began with a focus on Yemen.

As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing  Yemen in devastating war.

Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid  by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

In response, Coe wrote:

ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was  United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been  drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

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Amid the ongoing horror, it’s important to find ways to atone for war crimes —including reparations.

Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from 15 different countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, along the road to Mecca.

We aimed to nonviolently interpose ourselves between the warring parties. Soldiers are called upon to risk their lives for a cause they may not know much about. Why not ask peace activists to take risks on behalf of preventing and opposing wars?

So we witnessed the dismal onset of the air war at 3 a.m. on 17 January 1991, huddled under blankets, hearing distant explosions and watching anxiously as war planes flew overhead. With so many fighter jets crossing the skies, we wondered if there would be anything left of Baghdad.

Ten days later, Iraqi authorities told us we must pack up, readying for a morning departure to Baghdad. Not all of us could agree on how to respond. Adhering to basic principles, 12 peace team members resolved to sit in a circle, holding signs saying “We choose to stay.”

Buses arrived the next morning, along with two Iraqi civilians and two soldiers. Tarak, a civilian, was in charge, under orders to follow a timetable for the evacuation. Looking at the circle of 12, Tarak seemed a bit baffled. He walked over to where I stood. “Excuse me, Ms. Kathy,” he asked, “but what am I to do?”

“No one in that circle means you any harm,” I assured him. “And no one wishes to disrespect you, but they won’t be able board the bus on their own. It’s a matter of conscience.”

Tarak nodded and then motioned to the other Iraqis who followed him as he approached Jeremy Hartigan, the tallest person sitting in the circle. Jeremy, an elderly UK lawyer and also a Buddhist, was chanting a prayer as he sat with his sign.

Tarak bent over Jeremy, kissed him on the forehead, and said, ”Baghdad!” Then he pointed to the bus. Next, he, the other civilian and two Iraqi soldiers carefully hoisted  Jeremy, still in his cross-legged position, and carried him to the top step of the bus. Gently placing him down, Tarak then asked,  “Mister, you okay?!” And in this manner they proceeded to evacuate the remaining 11 people in the circle.

Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts, hungry, disheveled and unarmed, poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later called “the Highway of Death.”

Boxed in by U.S. forces, many Iraqis abandoned their vehicles and ran away from what had become a huge and very dangerous traffic jam. Iraqis attempting to surrender were stuck in a long line of Iraqi military vehicles. They were systematically slaughtered.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot of the air attack. Another called it “a turkey shoot.”

Days earlier, on February 24^th, the United States Army forces buried scores of living Iraqi soldiers in trenches. According to The New York Times, Army officials said “the Iraqi soldiers who died remained in their trenches as plow-equipped tanks dumped tons of earth and sand onto them, filling the trenches to ensure that they could not be used as cover from which to fire on allied units that were poised to pour through the gaps.”

Shortly after viewing photos of gruesome carnage caused by the ground and air attacks, President George H.W. Bush called for a cessation of hostilities on February 27^th, 1991. An official cease fire was signed on March 4.

It’s ironic that in October of 1990, Bush had asserted that the U.S. would never stand by and let a larger country swallow a smaller country. His country had just invaded Grenada and Panama, and as President Bush spoke, the U.S. military pre-positioned at three Saudi ports hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft, and millions of tons of equipment and fuel in preparation to invade Iraq.

Noam Chomsky notes that there were diplomatic alternatives to the bloodletting and destruction visited upon Iraq by Operation Desert Storm. Iraqi diplomats had submitted an alternative plan which was suppressed in the mainstream media and flatly rejected by the U.S.

The U.S. State Department, along with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the United Kingdom, were hell-bent on moving ahead with their war plans. “This was no time to go wobbly,” U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously warned Bush.

The resolve to attack and punish Iraqis never ceased.

After the “success” of Operation Desert Storm, the bombing war turned into an economic war, which lasted through 2003. As early as 1995, United Nations documents clarified that the economic war, waged through continued imposition of U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, was far more brutal than even the worst of the 1991 aerial and ground war attacks.

In 1995, two Food and Agriculture Organization scientists estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children under age five had likely died due to economic sanctions.

In February, 1998, while visiting a hospital in Baghdad, I watched two friends from the United Kingdom trying to absorb the horror of seeing children being starved to death because of policy decisions made by governments in the UK and the U.S. Martin Thomas, himself a nurse, looked at mothers sitting cross legged, holding their limp and dying infants, in a ward where helpless doctors and nurses tried to treat many dozens of children.

“I think I understand,” said Thomas. “It’s a death row for infants.” Milan Rai, now editor of Peace News and then the coordinator of a U.K. campaign to defy the economic sanctions, knelt next to one of the mothers. Rai’s own child was close in age to the toddler the mother cradled. “I’m sorry,” Rai murmured. “I’m so very sorry.”

Those six words whispered by Milan Rai, are, I believe, incalculably important.

If only people in the U.S. and the UK could take those words to heart, undertaking to finally pressure their governments to echo these words and themselves say, “We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry.”

We’re sorry for coldly viewing your land as a “target rich environment” and then systematically destroying your electrical facilities, sewage and sanitation plants, roads, bridges, infrastructure, health care, education, and livelihood. We’re sorry for believing we somehow had a right to the oil in your land, and we’re sorry many of us lived so well because we were consuming your precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices.

We’re sorry for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of your children through economic sanctions and then expecting you to thank us for liberating you. We’re sorry for wrongfully accusing you of harboring weapons of mass destruction while we looked the other way as Israel acquired thermonuclear weapons.

We’re sorry for again traumatizing your children through the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, filling your broken down hospitals with maimed and bereaved survivors of the vicious bombing and then causing enormous wreckage through our inept and criminal occupation of your land.

We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry. And we want to pay reparations.

From March 5 – 8, Pope Francis will visit Iraq. Security concerns are high, and I won’t begin to second guess the itinerary that has been developed. But knowing of his eloquent and authentic plea to end wars and stop the pernicious weapons trade, I wish he could kneel and kiss the ground at the Ameriyah shelter in Baghdad.

There, on February 13, 1991, two 2,000 lb. U.S. laser guided missiles killed 400 civilians, mostly women and children. Another 200 were severely wounded. I wish President Joe Biden could meet the Pope there and ask him to hear his confession.

I wish people around the world could be represented by the Pope as a symbol of unity expressing collective sorrow for making war after hideous war, in Iraq, against people who meant us no harm.

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