The plight of the children in Yemen is a humanitarian crisis that calls out for mankind to intercede and say enough is enough. A military intervention was launched by Saudi Arabia in 2015, leading a coalition of nine African and Middle East countries, responding to calls by Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi for military support in response to Houthi takeover in Yemen. The Houthi movement officially called Ansar Allah “Supporters of God”, is an Islamic religious-political-armed movement that emerged from Sa’dah in northern Yemen in the 1990s. They are of the Zaidi sect, and are predominantly Zaidi-Shia-led. The group emerged as a Zaydi opposition to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom they charged with massive financial corruption and criticized for being backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States at the expense of the Yemeni people and Yemen’s sovereignty. Some experts are calling the civil war a war by proxy involving Iran and Saudi Arabia which is 95 percent Sunni and Iran whose majority population is Shia. About 85 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are Sunnis. Shiites form a majority only in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, which is ruled by Sunni royals.
According to an article in the New York Times, a divide emerged after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, and disputes arose over who should shepherd the new and rapidly growing faith. Muhammad was the founder of Islam. He is viewed as the final prophet of God in all the main branches of Islam. Muhammad united Arabia into a single Muslim polity, with the Quran as well as his teachings and practices forming the basis of Islamic religious belief. After his death, some believed that a new leader should be chosen by consensus, others thought that only the prophet’s descendants should become caliph. The title passed to a trusted aide, Abu Bakr, though some thought it should have gone to Ali, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali eventually did become caliph after Abu Bakr’s two successors were assassinated. After Ali also was assassinated, with a poison-laced sword at the mosque in Kufa, in what is now Iraq, his sons Hasan and then Hussein claimed the title. But Hussein and many of his relatives were massacred in Karbala, Iraq, in 680. His martyrdom became a central tenet to those who believed that Ali should have succeeded the prophet. It is mourned every year during the month of Muharram. The followers became known as Shiites, a contraction of the phrase Shiat Ali, or followers of Ali.
Buthaina Muhammad Mansour al-Raimi is the sole survivor in her immediate family after an airstrike destroyed an apartment building in Yemen’s capital on August 25. The group also says the attack killed 16 people, including Buthaina’s parents and five siblings. Buthaina, now in the care of her aunt and uncle, her new guardians, doesn’t know that yet. Dramatic photographs published after the strike showed Buthaina being pulled from the rubble, her eyes sealed shut by bruises. Shortly after, local media tried to interview her while she was on her hospital bed. Buthaina tried to force one of her eyes open to see who was speaking to her. That the tiny gesture would turn into a symbol of Yemen’s plight. “She lost her entire family. It’s been 10 days since they died and she still asks her uncle when her parents will visit her,” Yasser al-Ghori, head of the emergency department of the hospital treating Buthaina, told reporters.
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