Taking their last breaths and still not knowing they are coming to the end of their precious lives the school boys are deeply shocked, their life supposed to be full of joy and happiness.
Many of them wished to be doctors, surgeons, engineers and sportsmen. Trying to figure out what happened or what is happening some of them come short of breath and die. They simply died. Of course this tragic scene is for some children regaining consciousness, their faces bloodied and limbs charred, the ones that still have few breaths left.
I am not trying to give you an unpleasant time or ruin your afternoon tea & biscuits with a dear friend, but just imagine, it is very hard and heart breaking. It would be harder if you are a father or a mother. However, a teacher, brother, sister, baseball coach, florist, police or an artist … generally, whoever that still has a conscious soul will be devastated by the scene. Let me warn you, it will haunt you for some time and probably leave a scare. It is not pleasant at all, it's sick.
Many of the boys were brought up by many hardships considering the situation in Yemen before and after the Saudi regime war. They actually hadn’t realized and felt many things like a warm food, bed, soft pillow, clean drinking water and etc. Their parents had high hopes for them which all crash landed and burned.
Imagine the scene with few more details maybe a market palace, the smell of burning paper probably coming from school books in blue UNICEF backpacks hat are splattered with blood, several school boys who appear to have lost their limbs, blood everywhere and lots of smoke, charred school bus, charred sneakers, charred clothes … charred everything. Several bodies lie under a blown-up bus. Human flesh scattered everywhere, blood on the street, the sound of car alarm, sirens and a loud, a very, very loud explosion. Did you get there?
A flash back
On Thursday a bus carrying a group of young Yemeni school children attending summer classes of the Holy Qur'an from a summer camp was hit by an airstrike conducted by the House of Saud regime-led coalition in a busy market area in the northern Majz District, in Sa’ada governorate.
According to the area's Health Ministry, 50 people were killed and 77 injured in the strike. The International Committee for the Red Cross said a hospital it supports in northern Sa’ada governorate had received 29 bodies of “mainly children” younger than 15, and 40 injured, including 30 children.
Johannes Bruwer, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation to Yemen, said in a tweet that most of those killed by the airstrike were children less than 10 years of age.
UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) called the Saudi regime airstrike “a low point in the country's brutal war” waged by the House of Saud regime.
And finally the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned the deadly airstrike, calling for an independent investigation into the case.
Back to the scene
Well everything seems to be on the right track, the remaining boys are taken to hospital, the streets are cleaned of blood stains and debris, the shop keepers are back to business and a funeral procession was held for the dead people, and of course the world bodies including the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Children's Fund condemned the massacre. IS that it?
Imagine the scene once more, with all its details. Remember the Children with their wandering eyes, still dizzy from the loud explosion … What if you knew one of the boys? Maybe one of them was your nephew, student, your son’s friend or even your own son. I do not want to disturb you at all but this tragedy happens every day in Yemen, not exactly the same but it takes place in many ugly ways that sometimes put in shadow the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Daesh) terrorist outfit’s crimes. If the Thursday school bus incident in Yemen would have happened to you or yours would you keep silence? Would you still react the same? I do not intend to judge or try to imply anything, however it made me feel deeply sad and think to what undone sin these school boys fell victim to? Such incident may even turn a law abiding citizen with probably couple of medals from the City Hall or the mayor into a blood thirsty terrorist looking for vendetta.
I want to draw your attention to the point that such attacks that turn weddings into funerals, schools and parks into graveyards and leave thousands of defenseless people traumatized is committed by the House of Saud regime and its allies including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Saudi regime is the custodian of the most sacred sites in Islam, the Great Mosque of Mecca (al-Haram Mosque/the Sacred Mosque) in the holy city of Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque (al-Masjid an-Nabawi) in the holy city of Medina. The Saudi regime claims it’s a regime that follows and practices the true Islam and Islamic teachings and cares about the human rights.
Pundits say there are many controversies regarding the Islam that is interpreted and preached by the Saudi regime preachers which is practiced by almost all terrorist outfits like the ISIL, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and … the list goes on. Each and every one in this planet knows killing a human is forbidden. It has nothing to do with the religion, clan or sect that you follow or practice, even if one person is an atheist. Killing a human being is against humanity. The question is how come a Muslim state like Saudi Arabia and the UAE wage a war on defenseless Yemeni women, children and men and kill them in cold blood. Saudi Arabia claims to be an Islamic State. Wahhabism is the version of Islam that is practiced and preached in the state. Wahhabism is also the version that almost all terrorist groups practice including the ISIL. The Saudi regime-led coalition, waged a war on the poorest state among Arab states, destroyed the country’s infrastructure and shamelessly denies targeting civilians. The Saudi regime also rejected a UN report last year that blacklisted Saudi Arabia for deaths and injuries to children in the Yemen war.
The Saudi regime in a defiant statement, has described the massacre as a “legitimate action” to target missile launchers used by Ansarullah (Houthi) movement fighters to target the southern Saudi city of Jizan.
Even if what the Saudi regime authorities claim is true, are innocent children a legitimate target? The children had a world full of dreams that the Saudi regime war jets destroyed in a matter of seconds.
There is also another aspect to the Saudi regime action. As many experts say it is the Saudi regime itself that created the ISIL terrorist outfit in the first place and the notorious outfit is a brain child of the Saudi regime Wahhabi school of thought.
Wahhabism
Wahhabism is an Islamic doctrine and religious movement. Wahhabism is named after an eighteenth-century preacher and activist, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The alliance between followers of Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud's successors (the House of Saud) proved to be a durable one. The House of Saud continued to maintain its politico-religious alliance with the Wahhabi sect. Today Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab's teachings are the official, state-sponsored form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. With the help of funding from Saudi regime petroleum exports, Wahhabism underwent “explosive growth”. The United States State Department has estimated that over the past four decades Riyadh has invested more than $10bn (£6bn) into foundations in an attempt to replace mainstream Sunni Islam with the harsher, intolerant Wahhabism.
The majority of Sunni and Shia Muslims worldwide disagree with the interpretation of Wahhabism, and many Muslims denounce them as a faction or a “vile sect”. Islamic scholars, including those from the Al-Azhar University, regularly denounce Wahhabism with terms such as “Satanic faith”. Wahhabism has been accused of being “a source of global terrorism”, inspiring the ideology of the ISIL, and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates and justifying their killing.
The crimes perpetrated by the Saudi regime-led coalition many times leads the ISIL in terms of brutality and number, they both practice Wahhabism.
A draft UN blacklist named the Saudi regime-led military coalition for killing and maiming children in Yemen. The Saudi coalition has killed hundreds of children in Yemen, the UN report says.
However, according to diplomatic sources the House of Saud regime piled pressure on then UN chief Ban Ki-moon over the blacklisting of the Saudi regime-led coalition for killing children in Yemen, with Riyadh threatening to cut Palestinian aid and funds to other UN programs.
Finally, the United Nations announced it had removed the Saudi coalition from a child rights blacklist pending a joint review by the world body and the coalition of cases of child deaths and injuries during the war it waged in Yemen.
That removal prompted angry reactions from human rights groups, which accused Ban of caving in to pressure from the petro-dollar rich state.
The bigger question is why there are so many double standards applied by big powers in dealing with certain issues? Why the world bodies, including the UN come short in ratifying a statement in condemning the Saudi regime atrocities in Yemen? Why the Saudi regime’s name is taken out of the child killing states of the UN? What happens to the families of the victims? Is the world losing its sense? There are many issues surrounding the Yemen war but the most important one is how the world will react to the Saudi regime’s recent act of massacre.
The House of Saud regime along with some of its allies, particularly the UAE, has been waging a deadly war against impoverished Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall former fugitive president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the popular Ansarullah movement.
The US and Britain have been criticized for providing logistical and military support to the Saudi regime-led coalition.
Grief and anger has gripped Yemen's war-ravaged province of Sa’ada after the Saudi regime-UAE military alliance bombed the school bus carrying children.
The attack came a week after the Saudi-led airstrike hit a busy fish market and the country's largest hospital, al-Thawra, in the port city of Hudaydah, killing 55 civilians and wounding 170 others.
According to the UN the war Saudi regime-led war in Yemen is now the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 22.2 million people -- three-quarters of the population -- in desperate need of aid and protection.
Yemen could also be facing its third major cholera epidemic, especially around Hudaydah, the World Health Organization has warned.
Pundits say it’s naive to believe the Saudi regime conducts all its crimes on its own. As the result it has support from some other countries and probably the green light to kill. They also point out to the fact that the world silence legitimizes the Saudi carnage of the Yemeni people.
Perhaps we are getting used to violence. Shedding the blood of school children, pregnant women and elders are getting a common style of the aggressors and terrorist outfits. First they invade your country, destroy its infrastructure, rape children and women and kill your compatriots and if one survives he/she will be left homeless, hopeless and soulless.
The Saudi regime has to answer not justify its killings in Yemen. World bodies have to react and seek answers. Only condemning and issuing statements are worthless without action.
MNA/TT
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