So tired

Of American Empire. WTF are we doing to Yemen?

The strike’s victims included Tayseer Okba, a 12-year-old girl who that morning had been visiting her 65-year-old grandmother, Amana al-Khowlani.

There is little mystery about the repeated attacks on the northern Saada Province, the birthplace of the Houthi movement. Months ago, the Saudi coalition declared that the entire province was a military zone, drawing an outcry from human rights groups that did little to deter the warplanes.

In border areas that the Houthis have used for attacks into Saudi Arabia, the coalition forces have struck deep into Yemeni territory, bombing hospitals, roads and towns even when no Houthi fighters are present, said Dr. Natalie Roberts, who worked with Doctors Without Borders in one of the few clinics in the province.

Mothers delivered babies in caves where they found shelter. People who were ill waited weeks before traveling to hospitals. “It’s no kind of life,” Dr. Roberts said. “Waiting in a cave to see if you’re going to get bombed.”

A road leading into Saada has been cratered by airstrikes that destroyed at least four bridges and obliterated trucks carrying fuel or livestock. In Saada City, so many houses were bombed in one neighborhood that all the residents simply fled.

Omar Mohammed al-Ghaily, 28, sat in the center of town, near the ruins of his clothing store, destroyed in airstrikes that razed a stretch of government buildings. The strikes killed Seif Ahmed Seif, who owned an umbrella store. Mr. Ghaily kept Mr. Seif’s identity card, maybe to return it one day to his daughter, who lives far away in Taiz. He kept coming to the rubble, he said, because he had “no place to go.”

Saada had suffered mightily over the last decade, when the Houthis fought six wars against Yemen’s central government. But those conflicts paled in comparison to the damage being inflicted by the coalition, Mr. Ghaily said: “this war from the sky.”