Articles by Kathy Kelly

Three years of U.S.-supported blockades and bombardments have plunged the Yemen into immiseration and chaos. “Civilians, including children, were killed and maimed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said João Martins, Doctors Without Borders head of mission in Yemen. "We are seeing civilian victims of airstrikes fighting for their lives in hospitals.” Lacking access to food, clean water, medicine and fuel, over 400,000 Yemeni children are at imminent risk of starvation.

International teen solidarity could challenge both the U.S. military and the National Rifle Association to end assaults on human life. "Our goal must be to demand that every person around the world agree to stop producing and using weapons," says Nasir, a teenager in Kabul.

Ta’iz, Yemen was home to a vibrant, creative youth movement during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Young men and women organized massive demonstrations to protest the enrichment of entrenched elites as ordinary people struggled to survive. The young people were exposing the roots of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today.

The comfortable nations often authorize the worst atrocities overseas through fear for their own safety, imagining themselves the victims to be protected from crime at all costs. Such attitudes entitle people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen to look in our direction when they ask, “Who are the criminals?”