The civil war in Yemen reached a grim milestone this week when Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N.’s resident humanitarian coordinator, spoke to reporters in Sana’a and released new figures that point to an immense and ongoing tragedy in that country. At least 10,000 people, McGoldrick reported, have been killed in Yemen since the war escalated when a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began a bombing campaign against the Houthi rebellion in March 2015.
The figure is a dramatic jump from the U.N.’s previous estimate of roughly 6,000 deaths, but is very likely to be a conservative guess. “The figures we have are probably incomplete because we take the numbers from functioning health services, and in some of these areas there are no functioning health services,” McGoldrick said. “People get killed or die and are actually buried before they are recorded, and we don’t have a way of recording that.”
