The news has been covering the Syrian Refugee Crisis for a while now, where more than half of the Syrian population is trying to flee from the Assad regime and ISIS terrorism. What the media has not been talking about is Yemen’s war with Saudi Arabia and the growing number of displaced people that are coming out of this conflict.

I wanted to discover what is going on with Yemen refugees escaping their war-torn country. Yemen has a population of over 26 million and is the poorest Middle Eastern country according to Think Progress. Ever since the Civil War started in 2015, there has been 2.4 million Yemenis displaced according to UN Human Right Council (UNHCR). Instead of heading to Europe though, Yemenis are going to Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Oman and some even to Saudi Arabia, the country that is bombing them. Now why are the refugees going to mostly African countries and not Europe? Think Progress points out that Yemen is one of the few Middle Eastern countries to sign the 1951 Refugee Convention Treaty, even though they are destitute they are generous in letting migrants into their country. It is difficult for them to escape because they are surrounded by desert, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden. So instead of taking a boat to Europe they go to Africa, most of the camps especially in Djibouti are overcrowded. But for the few that do get to Europe, it is a nightmare.

Al Jazeera did a story about a Yemen citizen who escaped his war-torn country to stay with family members in France to continue his education, but was denied because at the time there was a plan agreed upon by EU proposed that refugees (mainly Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean) be distributed around Europe to relieve the burden of what they call the “frontline states” of Italy and Greece. So you have thousands of Yemeni refugees who are in Greece, trying to get to mainland Europe but are being denied because the UN does not think that Yemen is a crisis on the same scale as Syria or Iraq. Most of the Yemen refugees in Greece, including Al-Shaibani, want to go back to Yemen because the economy in Greece is dreadful. They will just end up being homeless in the street.

This is so heartbreaking and once again the U.S is partly to blame for this as we help arm the Saudi’s who are killing innocent Yemenis. According to Salon, 10,000 civilians have died 2/3 of them from airstrikes. A couple of weeks ago a U.S naval ship fired upon a Houthi rebel base making us players in this war for Saudi Arabia. If we want these refugee crises to stop, the West needs to stop getting itself in these wars and we need to act on climate change because that is a major factor in these massive migrations. If we go on at this rate with climate change, the Middle East will be uninhabitable by 2090 according to the Washington Post. And then we’ll really have a huge problem.