From combat to protest camps: A painful end for pro-coalition wounded
TAIZ, Nov. 17 (YPA) – Dozens of wounded fighters loyal to the Saudi-led coalition began an open-ended sit-in on Sunday outside the local authority headquarters in central Taiz, escalating their demands for long-overdue financial payments.
Many of the demonstrators, injured in fighting alongside coalition-backed factions, pitched the first tents of their sit-in while urging the pro-coalition government to pay their long-delayed stipends.
They further appealed for prosthetic limbs and medical evacuation for severe cases.
The wounded protesters said their living and medical conditions had become unbearable, noting that many of them urgently need advanced surgeries and reconstructive or rehabilitative care that coalition countries have not provided despite repeated promises.
According to the demonstrators, the open-ended sit-in comes after years of petitions and peaceful appeals that yielded no tangible response.
The sit-in in Taiz follows a similar protest held earlier this month in Marib, where pro-coalition wounded fighters also demanded overdue salaries and proper medical treatment.
Protesters said they had received no response from either Saudi Arabia and the UAE or from the pro-coalition government.
The scene of pro-coalition wounded fighters reflects a humanitarian tragedy, as they were used as cheap tools in Saudi and Emirati expansionist battles during the war in Yemen declared on March 26, 2015, and confronting ‘Iran’, while the real goal is to carry out its destructive projects and redraw the political map according to the American, British, and Israeli agendas in the region.
The coalition countries exploited these youths through local forces that recruited thousands of them and threw them into battles in which they had nothing to do with them. While those leaders, war profiteers, live with their families outside Yemen, managing their business interests after establishing their own investment companies.
The wounded and the dead were merely numbers in a dirty political equation and cheap fuel in the fire of regional and international power struggles, all at the expense of Yemen—its land and its people
Consequently, the pro-coalition recruits ended up wounded, facing an uncertain future and living in severe hardship after months without pay.
Many have been left ‘by the roadside’ in makeshift camps, struggling to secure even their most basic rights. They bear a double burden: worsening living conditions and the suspension of their salaries for the fifth consecutive month, amid promises by the coalition countries and their allied government that have vanished like smoke.
E.Y.M