Yemen’s refugee crisis attracting global concern

MAZRAK CAMP, Yemen

Salha Asman Mousa and her five sons were eating dinner when their village was bombed mid-September.

“The planes came to attack the Houthis,” she said, squinting under a straw hat in the sweltering desert sun. “Everyone wanted to protect themselves. We just ran away.”

Mrs. Mousa, her family and about 220 other villagers walked for three days, sleeping under trees - when they could find them - before the family found shelter in a scorching desert refugee camp. They brought nothing but their children.

Mrs. Mousa is among 150,000 people displaced since a war that broke out in northern Yemen in 2004, according to the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF. As many as 30,000 people have fled their homes since the latest and fiercest round of fighting began in early August.

The conflict in the north pits the Houthis, a fiercely anti-Western group of Shi’ites who claim they are defending themselves against violent oppression, against the Yemeni government. The government in the predominantly Sunni country claims to be defending itself against armed extremist insurgency.

By the time Mrs. Mousa arrived at the Mazrak camp, thousands of others were already living in rows of dusty tents. She and her sons set up camp on a rocky edge of the makeshift settlement. Now, about 14,000 people live in and around Mazrak, according to government statistics. It is less than 8 miles from battles in the nearby mountains.

It’s hot, desolate, short-staffed, undersupplied and as many as 1,400 newly displaced people arrive each week.

And while the war and the rapidly growing humanitarian crisis are currently confined within the arid Arabian country, experts say the conflict is deteriorating security in Yemen, the region and beyond.

“Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state,” wrote Foreign Policy magazine while releasing its 2009 Failed State Index.

Strategically located, and only minimally controlled by a central government in the best of times, scholars and leaders say Yemen is becoming a stronghold for the already growing al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The group recently moved operations from Saudi Arabia to Yemen, from which it sent a suicide bomber in August to kill a senior Saudi prince. Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, a deputy Interior minister with responsibility for the kingdom’s anti-terror campaign, was lightly wounded in the attack.

Yemen faces a host of other problems, including a violent secessionist movement, piracy, a water and oil crisis, and a population set to double in the next two decades.

Some scholars predict that without significant action from outside, Yemen’s central authority could dissolve.

“The inability of the Yemeni central government to fully control its territory will create space for violent extremists to regroup and launch attacks against domestic and international targets,” wrote Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a recent report.

Story Continues →