Global politics inside.
10k+ dead in Yemen, and now this horrific Khashoggi murder...
And our president hypothesizes “rogue killers”. Unbelievable.
In the name of standing up to Iran, bin Salman launched a 2015 air war in Yemen that has cost more than 10,000 lives, and devastated what was already the poorest country in the Arab world. Of the 16,749 bombing runs recorded since 2015 by the Yemen Data Project, an independent human-rights monitoring group, nearly a third targeted nonmilitary sites. “You are waiting to die if you are here,” says Radhya Almutawakel of the Yemeni nonprofit Mwatana Organization for Human Rights, speaking by phone from Sana’a, the capital. The U.N. calls it “the worst man-made humanitarian disaster of our time.”
Bin Salman remains resolute. Although he told TIME he does not rule out sending ground troops, his priority is that the war remain painless for Saudis. “We want to be assured that whatever happens, the Saudi people shouldn’t feel it,” he says. “The economy shouldn’t be harmed or even feel it. So we are trying to be sure that we are far away from whatever escalation happens.” The White House so far is happy to play a supporting role in the Yemen war, providing intelligence, midair refueling and billions of dollars of munitions.