News
Eight and a half years passed since the first dream of Yemenis, their first yell when they discovered that they could make their oppressed country an oasis of freedoms and social justice.
At that time, they were dreaming of change, filled with great energy. Happy Yemen undertook a peaceful revolution par excellence to remove those who wreaked corruption in the country and skewed its compass, so you would find the revolutionaries in one street and the supporters in another, each of them doing what they deem correct, But hidden hands manipulated this revolution and turned it into a bloodbath after it searched for an excuse to pounce on the revolutionaries and power.
From that moment on, the ultimate dreams of Yemenis were to only survive, after the Houthi militia mined Yemeni lands and embarked on recruiting children and throwing civilians in their coup’s incinerators.
This is in addition to its reliance on planting explosives and mines, which are forbidden internationally, not as a mean of self-defense, but as a systematic policy to target innocent people and inflict the largest possible number of victims in retaliation against civilians, especially because of the continuous bleeding in its ranks and daily losses, in addition to the community’s lack of acceptance and aversion to them, which sparked their madness and hatred, and made it precede this criminal act, so it implanted its deadly thorns in residential neighborhoods, public roads, valleys, farms, schools, hospitals and wells, indifferent to the dangers that would result from this action.
The Houthi policy of planting mines did not exclude bridges, universities, mosques, homes, sea and transit areas of international commercial ships, thus representing a threat to international shipping and a reason for depriving hundreds of fishermen from practicing their profession.
The results of field surveys to study the extent of mine problem in Yemen showed that all governorates were contaminated with mines. Al-Jawf Governorate, that good land was not immune to this disaster, which now monitors citizen’s movement and causes victims on a daily basis. The local authorities in the strategic province, parts of which are bordering with Saudi Arabia, say that Al-Jawf Governorate is facing a catastrophic situation as a result of the Houthis’ massive cultivation of mines in large areas of the governorate. The directorates of Khub, Al-Sha’af, Al-Ghayl, Al-Maslub, Al-Hazm, and Al-Mutun are considered the most polluted directorates of this scourg.
The Director of the Human Rights Office in Al-Jawf, Abdul-Hadi Al-Assar, confirmed that 815 violations were monitored as a result of mines since 2015 until the end of last year, indicating that by the end of 2019 an estimated 190 dead, 385 cases of injury, maiming and disability were recorded, in addition to 78 cases of vehicles destruction and about 165 cases of psychological damage caused to victims relatives and families, indicating that most of the victims fell while using the roads, or entering their farms or in livestock grazing areas.
Such disgraceful acts and violations are inconsistent with all local and international treaties and ethical norms, which disrupted Project Masam workers and made them race against time to save Yemenis from the Houthi death traps. The Managing Director of project Masam, Mr. Ousama AlGosaibi, announced that, last week, the engineering teams cleared 1,385 mines, unexploded ordnance and explosive devices from different regions of Yemen, bringing the total of what was cleared from the beginning of November until the last Friday to 6114 mines.
The total number of mines, unexploded ordnance and Explosive devices that has been cleared by the project since its inception in June of 2018 reached 201385, which is the minimum number of innocent people who have been saved from death.
The establishment of this humanitarian project in one way or another mitigated this disaster for the Yemenis. Where it was able to clear many areas and address the direct threats to the Yemenis lives, strengthened security and helped Yemenis in fixing human tragedies caused by the spread of mines.