Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2025 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Yemen
The Yemen War is one of the Most Destructive since the Cold War:  UN

The Yemen War is one of the Most Destructive since the Cold War: UN

Middle East Monitor 05/02/2019

Tweet
Share
Reddit
Email

A recent UN report sheds light on the devastating humanitarian and economic impact of the war in Yemen and how it sets back human development there more than 20 years, Anadolu reports.

The report by the organization’s development program (UNDP) highlights the humanitarian situation there, which was one of the worst in the world even prior to the war, but has gotten worse since tensions escalated.

With its 30 million people, Yemen ranked 153 on the Human Development Index, 138 in extreme poverty, 147 in life expectancy, 172 in educational attainment and was already on the World Bank’s low-middle income category, according to the report.

READ: UNHCR aids 250,000 displaced people in Yemen

Experts suggest “Yemen would not have achieved any of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” set out by the UN to reach by 2030 even in the absence of conflict.

The UNDP’s Yemen representative, Auke Lootsma, said “even if there were to be peace tomorrow, it could take decades for Yemen to return to pre-conflict levels of developments.”

Child deaths to soar if war continues

The report paints a gloomy picture for the foreseeable future and places Yemen among the most destructive conflict zones since the end of the Cold War.

If the war were to end in 2019, the UNDP projects it would account for 140,000 deaths of children under the age of 5; 233,000 deaths (0.8% of the 2019 population) with 102,000 combat deaths and 131,000 indirect deaths due to lack of food, health services and infrastructure.

It estimates infant mortality will further exacerbate — 331,000 deaths of children under 5 — with one child death every 7 minutes and 482,000 deaths in total if the conflict continues until 2022.

Deaths in Yemen Conflict – Cartoon [Sarwar Ahmed/MiddleEastMonitor]

The outlook gets bleaker if the conflict continues through 2030.

The report estimates 1.5 million children die at a rate of one every two minutes and 1.8 million Yemenis die in total — overwhelmingly, not in combat but indirectly because of the lack of humanitarian needs.

Economic cost

Yemen’s loss of economic output because of the conflict, which is $89 billion for 2019, will climb to $181 billion in 2022.

That figure soars to $657 billion in 2030 if the international community fails to put pressure on warring parties to stop the conflict.

Yemen has been wracked by chaos since 2014, when the Houthi rebel group overran much of the country.

IOM: Thousands of migrants rounded up in southern Yemen

The following year, a Saudi-led military coalition launched a devastating air campaign in Yemen aimed at rolling back Houthi gains.

Since then, thousands of people — including numerous civilians — are believed to have been killed in the ongoing conflict, while the UN has warned that some 14 million Yemenis remain at risk of starvation.

Turkey has been a major contributor of humanitarian aid to the war-weary country since the war began.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Aljazeera English: ” Does the West have blood on its hands in Yemen? | Inside Story”

Filed Under: Yemen

About the Author

Middle East Monitor is a not-for-profit press monitoring organization, founded on 1 July 2009, and based in London. Journalists who have written for it include Amelia Smith, Diana Alghoul, Ben White, Jehan Alfarra and Jessica Purkiss. The editorial line straddles the British left and the British Muslim religious Right.

Primary Sidebar

Support Independent Journalism

Click here to donate via PayPal.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter to have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.
Warning! Social media will not reliably deliver Informed Comment to you. They are shadowbanning news sites, especially if "controversial."
To see new IC posts, please sign up for our email Newsletter.

Social Media

Bluesky | Instagram

Popular

  • When Politics Leaves Reality Behind
  • Trump, the Suez Canal, and the end of Eisenhower's World Order
  • Are Cyberattacks and Iran's Port Explosion the First Salvo in Disrupting U.S.-Iran Nuclear Talks?
  • My Palestine: An Impossible Exile
  • The Obscenity of Collective Punishment in Gaza

Gaza Yet Stands


Juan Cole's New Ebook at Amazon. Click Here to Buy
__________________________

Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



Click here to Buy Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


Click here to Buy The Rubaiyat.
Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2025 All Rights Reserved