By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

No figures of casualties in crisis-torn countries, whether those in the grip of war or whether those afflicted by natural disasters or suffering from pandemics, are the actual count of the dead or wounded.
These are estimates and could either be short of the exact number or might be more than the actual lives lost or those suffering from injuries, starvation, and diseases.
Whatever the opinion of the experts, in the case of Yemen, the Arab world’s most impoverished country which for the past seven years has been aggressed upon by two of the richest Arab states – Saudi Arabia and the UAE – the recently released figure of 377,000 dead by the year’s end (a month away), indicates not only the gravity of the human rights situation but also the crimes being committed with gay abandon against humanity by the heartless invaders.
Currently, because of the intransigence of the invaders and the continued flow of deadly weapons to them from the US, Britain, France, and Israel, there seems to be no end to the plight of the people of Yemen, whose death toll in the next 8 years, provided the current rate of fatalities are not accelerated, is expected to reach 1.3 million.
This is what the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says in its latest report on war-torn Yemen, where an estimated 70 percent of those killed happen to be children under the age of five.
It said 60 percent of deaths are the result of indirect causes, such as hunger and preventable diseases, with the remainder a result of direct causes like front-line combat and air raids.
The UNDP report also said the number of those experiencing malnutrition would surge to 9.2 million by 2030, and the number of people living in extreme poverty would reach 22 million, or 65 percent of the population.
These figures are enough to melt the hardest of hearts, but not the stone hearts in the bestial breasts of the regimes in Washington, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi.
The first four of the above mentioned regimes might be reaping a rich harvest in billions of dollars of weaponry they are selling to fan the flames of a fratricidal fray between Muslim countries, but what benefit do the last two named regimes gain by destroying a fellow Arab nation and slaughtering its people and that too at the exorbitant cost of a constant drain of their treasuries?
Perhaps sadism is the word that comes to the mind of any independent observer, but the painful truth is something else.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with some other rootless and unrepresentative regimes in the region, such as Bahrain, are dead scared of the steadily dawning reality that an independent, strong, and flourishing Yemen would inspire people of the Arabian Peninsula to rise up to reclaim their right to be masters of their own political and economic destiny.
This is the main reason they have willingly put the Zionist yoke around their necks – in addition to the American and British yokes that were already there – in the vain belief that they would be able to subjugate the Yemenis, no matter what burden the war places on their economies.
If only they had learned from their failure in Syria and Iraq where their funding of the macabrely murderous takfiri terrorists whom the US and Israel provided all sorts of lethal armaments, including internationally banned chemical weapons, did not bring them any benefits except slaughter and displacement millions of fellow Arabs!
The Yemenis have shown their indomitable resistance in the face of bombing, along with their ingenuity to produce and use drones and ballistic missiles that regularly shatter the defences of the aggressors.
Thus, to safeguard their freedom and the independence of their homeland they are ready to offer more sacrifices with full confidence in defeating the aggressors and forcing them to pay war indemnity.