This morn­ing we found many sto­ries and news releases about the armed con­flict in Yemen. Bat­tles there are mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for aid groups to take care of the peo­ple who have fled due to the fighting.

U.N. agen­cies have pulled out almost all of their staff and are instead giv­ing aid to those in calmer areas. The Inter­na­tional Red Cross still has work­ers in the area and say they are attempt­ing to take care of 16,000 people.

From this IRIN story that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the bat­tle in Yemen.

Aid orga­ni­za­tions are find­ing it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to help civil­ians in the north­ern Yemeni gov­er­norate of Saada after renewed clashes there between the army and the al-Houthi Shia rebels.
“Saada is an active, armed con­fronta­tion with a very volatile secu­rity sit­u­a­tion, so the World Food Pro­gramme [WFP] has to care­fully bal­ance staff secu­rity on one side and its man­date to assist affected peo­ple [on the other],” Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP’s Yemen rep­re­sen­ta­tive, told IRIN.

Fight­ing in Saada flared up again on 12 August. Aer­ial bom­bard­ments of Houthi strong­holds in Saada have forced many to flee into neigh­bour­ing governorates.

Accord­ing to UN agen­cies, there are some 150,000 inter­nally dis­placed per­sons (IDPs) in Saada and the gov­er­norates of al-Jawf, Haj­jah and Amran as a result of the conflict.

The Yemeni Red Cres­cent (YRC) and the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are the only two orga­ni­za­tions run­ning IDP camps in Saada Gov­er­norate, accord­ing to Abbas Zabarah, secretary-general of the YRC.

Other inter­na­tional NGOs are also work­ing in the region, but with great dif­fi­culty because of the inse­cure roads in and out of Saada.

“The dif­fi­cul­ties of trav­el­ling the main roads hin­der access to the pop­u­la­tion, and espe­cially the injured, [and] to health struc­tures,” said a recent state­ment by Médecins Sans Frontières.

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