By Alia Allana
...The seeds of the epidemic were planted in 2015, (click here) when a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and backed by the United States joined the fighting in Yemen on behalf of the ousted president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who had been forced out by Houthi rebels. The rebels, who are backed by Iran, today control the capital, Sana, and most of the territory along the country’s Red Sea coast. Saudi Arabia imposed the most recent blockade after the Houthis fired a missile at Riyadh.
When the war began on March 26, 2015, workers on the night shift at a wastewater treatment plant in Sana watched Saudi jets bomb airplanes, runways and buildings at the adjacent international airport. A boundary wall was all that separated the airport and the treatment plant. The terrified workers took refuge in a nearby mosque.
The next morning all of the 26 employees of the wastewater treatment plant showed up for work. They knew if human waste wasn’t disposed of properly, waterborne disease could sicken hundreds of thousands.
The workers left the lights on at the plant hoping the coalition pilots would read it as a sign that the plant wasn’t a military target. “Little did we know that all of Yemen was a military target,” said an engineer at the plant, who asked to remain anonymous for his safety. On another night, the coalition bombed a crane at the plant.
On April 17, 2015, the Saudi-led coalition jets bombed the central electricity grid supplying Sana. The capital lost all electricity. The workers kept the plant running with diesel fuel. A week later, as the diesel began running out, they reduced operations to eight hours, to six, to two.
By late May 2015, the fuel was gone and the plant shut down.
Soon after the coalition imposed a naval blockade, ostensibly to prevent weapons from reaching Houthi rebels, reducing the supply of food, medicine and fuel to a trickle. Yemen imports more than 85 percent of its food and medicine, most of it by sea.
Coalition forces turned away or stopped ships heading for Yemeni ports for weeks. Fighting around ports such as Hodeida, the country’s largest cargo port, worsened shortages.
With the treatment plant out of power, wastewater flowed down canals and into the valleys around Sana. Dirty water spread over miles of farmland. Flies hovered above the raw sewage. Cucumbers, tomatoes and leafy greens grown in the contaminated water made their way to markets around Sana. Many cases of acute diarrhea were reported....
