CAIRO
— A haunted look in the eyes of Amal Hussain, an emaciated 7-year-old
lying silently on a hospital bed in northern Yemen, seemed to sum up the
dire circumstances of her war-torn country.
A
searing portrait of the starving girl published in The New York Times
last week drew an impassioned response from readers. They expressed
heartbreak. They offered money for her family. They wrote in to ask if
she was getting better.
On Thursday, Amal’s family said she had died at a ragged refugee camp four miles from the hospital.
“My
heart is broken,” said her mother, Mariam Ali, who wept during a phone
interview. “Amal was always smiling. Now I’m worried for my other
children.”
The
grievous human cost of the Saudi-led war in Yemen has jumped to the top
of the global agenda as the outcry over the killing of the Saudi
dissident Jamal Khashoggi prompts Western leaders to re-examine their
support for the war.
Recently, the
United States and Britain, Saudi Arabia’s biggest arms suppliers, called
for a cease-fire in Yemen. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said it should
take effect within 30 days. “We have got to move toward a peace effort
here, and we can’t say we are going to do it some time in the future,”
Mr. Mattis said on Tuesday.
Riveting
images of malnourished Yemenis like Amal — one of 1.8 million severely
malnourished children in Yemen — have put a human face to fears that a
catastrophic man-made famine could engulf the country in the coming
months.
The United Nations warns that
the number of Yemenis relying on emergency rations, eight million,
could soon rise to 14 million. That’s about half Yemen’s population.
Aid
workers and now political leaders are calling for a cessation of
hostilities, as well as emergency measures to revive the battered
economy of Yemen, where soaring food prices have pushed millions to the
brink.
On a trip to Yemen to see the
toll the war has taken, we found Amal at a health center in Aslam, 90
miles northwest of the capital, Sana. She was lying on a bed with her
mother. Nurses fed her every two hours with milk, but she was vomiting
regularly and suffered from diarrhea.
Dr.
Mekkia Mahdi, the doctor in charge, sat by her bed, stroking her hair.
She tugged on the flaccid skin of Amal’s stick-like arms. “Look,” she
said. “No meat. Only bones.”
Image
Amal’s
mother was also sick, recovering from a bout of dengue fever that she
had most likely contracted from mosquitoes that breed in stagnant water
in their camp.
Saudi airstrikes had
forced Amal’s family to flee their home in the mountains three years
ago. The family was originally from Saada, a province on the border with
Saudi Arabia that has borne the brunt of at least 18,000 Saudi-led
airstrikes in Yemen since 2015. Saada is also the homeland of the Houthi
rebels who control northern Yemen, and are seen by the Saudi crown
prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as a proxy for rival Iran.
The geopolitics of the war seemed distant, however, in the hushed hunger wards in Aslam.
Amal
is Arabic for “hope,” and some readers expressed hope that the graphic
image of her distress could help galvanize attention on a war in which
tens of thousands of civilians have died from violence, hunger or
disease. Last year, Yemen suffered the largest cholera epidemic in
modern times, with over a million cases.
Amal
was discharged from the hospital in Aslam last week, still sick. But
doctors needed to make room for new patients, Dr. Mahdi said. “This was a
displaced child who suffered from disease and displacement,” she said.
“We have many more cases like her.”
The
family took Amal back home, to a hut fashioned from straw and plastic
sheeting, at a camp where relief agencies do provide some help,
including sugar and rice. But it was not enough to save Amal.
Her
condition deteriorated, with frequent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea,
her mother said. On Oct. 26, three days after she was discharged from
the hospital, she died.
Dr. Mahdi had urged Amal’s mother to take the child to a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Abs, about 15 miles away.
But
the family was broke. Fuel prices have risen about 50 percent in the
past year, part of a broader economic collapse, and that has pushed even
short, potentially lifesaving journeys beyond the reach of many
families.
“I had no money to take her to the hospital,” Ms. Ali said. “So I took her home.”
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