Sanaa reveals number of victims of cluster bombs in Yemen

SANAA, Oct. 03 (YPA) – The Ministry of Human Rights and the Executive Center for Mine Action in Sanaa launched on Tuesday the documentary report entitled “Cluster bombs and remnants of aggression… war crimes and mass destruction.”

At the launch event, Ali Safra, Executive Director of Mine Action, revealed that the Saudi-led coalition aircraft launched more than 2,932 raids using cluster bombs during the past nine years.

Safra announced that the total number of civilian victims as a result of the coalition’s use of cluster bombs since the beginning of the war amounted to approximately 9,000 victims, most of whom were women and children.

He pointed out that coalition aircraft used more than 3,187,630 cluster munitions of “American, British, Pakistani, and Brazilian” nationalities spread in most provinces of the Republic of Yemen.

Safra pointed out that the center documented the effects of the indiscriminate and excessive use of these deadly weapons in 119 districts in 19 provinces, stressing that the coalition deliberately targeted areas, residential communities, valleys, and flood paths with the intention of spreading them in various regions, especially agricultural lands.

For his part, the Minister of Human Rights in the caretaker government, Ali Al-Dailami, explained that most of the cluster bombs were used among population centers in the provinces of Saada, Hajjah, and Sanaa.

Al-Dailami said: “We noticed in international reports the deliberate absence of mentioning the users of cluster bombs in Yemen, namely the coalition countries,” adding that many cluster bombs are still present in the targeted locations and their radioactive emissions pose a danger to the entire society.

He noted that the coalition’s targeting of service sectors has exacerbated the humanitarian situation for millions of citizens, and many of them have become unsafe due to the spread of cluster bombs there.

It is worth noting that the nightmare of the remnants of prohibited coalition weapons still looms over civilians in several provinces of Yemen, which are filled with remnants of cluster bombs and prohibited weapons, as Yemen was classified as the country with the highest contamination of explosive objects in the world, according to United Nations reports.

YPA