The Forgotten Country
The Forgotten Country is a photographic story about Yemen during the country’s devastating civil war. I travelled to northern Yemen in 2018 with a colleague, documenting the consequences of the conflict and humanitarian crisis for people living in areas affected by the fighting.
At the time, Yemen was experiencing one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. Millions of people were in need of humanitarian assistance, while widespread displacement, food insecurity and limited access to healthcare affected communities across the country.
The conflict in Yemen was often described as the ‘forgotten war’. But for the people living through it, the consequences were anything but distant. Through portraits, reportage and everyday scenes, this project documents some of the people and places caught in the middle of the conflict.
The UN estimated that unemployment in Yemen could be as high as 50 percent in some of the hardest-hit areas, while around 79 percent of the population lived in poverty. Despite this, the khat industry continued to flourish. These men, sitting by the roadside between Saada and Hajjah and chewing the mildly narcotic green leaves, are not an unusual sight. The scene is repeated across parts of the country every afternoon.
Abdallah Ali Ahmed Algash is one of Yemen’s many internally displaced people. He fled his home in Hodeidah with his family of 56: his wife, 24 other adults and 31 children. The family sold everything they owned to afford the journey. They now live in a camp for internally displaced people near the city of Abs in Hajjah province in northern Yemen, without money or the means to provide for themselves.
Fifteen-year-old Fuad is carried out of a field hospital near the port city of Hodeidah. His family’s car is waiting outside. The boy has been injured in a motorcycle accident, and doctors have put his leg in a cast. There is no functioning hospital in the area, but although Fuad has had to receive treatment in the spartan conditions of the field unit, he is lucky. According to the UN, less than half of Yemen’s health facilities were functioning at the time, and in many areas people were forced to travel hundreds of kilometres to receive medical attention.
The queue has collapsed. Women and men push towards the front of the crowd to receive their share of scarce aid rations being distributed by ADRA and UNHCR at the Abu Bakr al-Assadiq transit centre. The building in Yemen’s old capital, Sanaa, used to be a school. It is now home to around 600 displaced people from the Hodeidah area, centre manager Hami Abdullah Fahem explains.
Akram is 15 years old and lies on an operating table in a field hospital near the frontlines in Hodeidah. The city had seen some of the fiercest clashes of the war. Akram was hit by fragments from a grenade.
Many of Yemen’s internally displaced people live under extremely difficult conditions. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that many were in desperate need of shelter, food, water and basic sanitation.
This was certainly the case at the al-Fayush camp outside Aden. On this barren piece of land, the landowner had given internally displaced people permission to build small shelters from tarpaulin, plastic bags, tins and whatever else they could find in the surrounding area. Several of the women in the camp said they had no sanitary facilities and waited until nightfall to go to the toilet, when no one could see them.
Ahmed Ibrahim is 65 years old and lives at the Al-Shafaqa Center in Sanaa. The centre helps kidney and cancer patients who cannot afford treatment themselves. Ahmed has cancer and has lost his ability to speak. Centre manager Mohamed Shimsan explains that the centre houses 80 patients and their families, but because of the war and soaring medicine prices, it struggles to pay for treatment and rent.
At the time, the UN reported that a child under the age of five died in Yemen every ten minutes. Fortunately, Said is still alive. He is nine months old and is being examined by doctors at the triage unit at Al-Jumhuri Hospital in Saada. He is 68 centimetres long and weighs 5.6 kilograms. According to his doctor, Dr Ali Al-Gamadis, he should weigh roughly twice as much and is in serious need of medical attention. Said’s father, Minar Msfar Salem, has pawned his mobile phone to raise the last money needed to pay for one day of treatment for his son. The bill amounts to 3,000 Yemeni rials, roughly ten and a half euros at the time.
Nada Ajyah and her family were fleeing their home in Hodeidah when their car hit a roadside bomb. The 12-year-old girl was killed instantly.