Originally published 2022-03-17.
In early March 2022, as the world's attention was fixed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Angelina Jolie travelled to Aden in southern Yemen as Special Envoy of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR. Her message was simple: the suffering of Ukrainians deserves the world's help, and so does the suffering of Yemenis, after seven years of war that the UN had long described as one of the worst humanitarian crises on Earth. She met displaced families and refugees and used her large social media following to argue that compassion should not depend on where a war happens.
The visit to Aden
UNHCR announced Jolie's arrival in Aden on 6 March 2022, saying she had come to remind the world of the forgotten suffering of millions of Yemenis. Aden, a port city on the Gulf of Aden, had served as the base of Yemen's internationally recognised government since rebels took the capital, Sanaa. It also hosts many people displaced from fighting elsewhere in the country, as well as refugees and migrants from the Horn of Africa, mainly Somalia and Ethiopia.
UNHCR’s Special Envoy, Angelina Jolie, arrived in Aden, Yemen, determined to remind the world of the forgotten suffering of millions of people in Yemen. pic.twitter.com/CmggKMCUHE
— UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) March 6, 2022
Over the following days Jolie posted from the ground on Instagram, describing meetings with families who had fled their homes. She pointed to figures that showed the scale of the crisis: in 2022 a civilian was being killed or injured roughly every hour, the economy had been shattered, and more than 20 million Yemenis relied on humanitarian aid to survive.
"Everyone deserves the same compassion"
Jolie's visit came only days after the start of the war in Ukraine, which within its first two weeks had forced more than two million people to flee abroad. She did not set the two crises against each other. Instead, she drew a lesson from Europe's generous reaction to Ukrainian refugees and asked that the same standard be applied everywhere. In one Instagram post she wrote:
"We cannot be selective about who deserves support and whose rights we defend. Everyone deserves the same compassion."
She added that civilian lives in every conflict are of equal value and that, after seven years of war, Yemenis also needed protection, support and, above all, peace.
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
Her comments touched a wider debate in early 2022. Aid agencies and commentators noted how quickly governments mobilised for Ukraine, opening borders and pledging billions, while appeals for places such as Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Ethiopia remained badly underfunded. The point was not that Ukraine received too much, but that other crises received too little.
How Yemen's war began
Yemen, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, was already the poorest country in the Arab world before the war. Its current conflict began in September 2014, when the Houthis, a movement rooted in the country's Zaydi Shia community in the north, seized Sanaa and took control of much of the state. In March 2015, as Houthi forces closed in on Aden, President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled abroad and went on to lead his government largely from Saudi Arabia.
On 26 March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states launched airstrikes to restore Hadi's government. Iran has supported the Houthis politically and, according to UN experts and Western governments, with weapons, which is why the war is often described as part of the wider rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran. The United States and the United Kingdom supported the coalition with arms sales, intelligence and, for several years, logistics such as aerial refuelling. Human rights groups documented coalition airstrikes that hit markets, schools, hospitals and weddings, as well as abuses by the Houthis, including indiscriminate shelling and the recruitment of child soldiers. In February 2021 the Biden administration announced an end to US support for coalition offensive operations.
The human cost in numbers
Counting the dead in Yemen is difficult, and figures vary depending on what they include. The UN has estimated that more than 150,000 people were killed directly in fighting and air raids. That number, often quoted in early 2022, captures only part of the toll.
A report published by the UN Development Programme in November 2021 projected that, by the end of that year, the war would have caused about 377,000 deaths in total. Around 60% were indirect, from hunger, the collapse of health care and preventable diseases such as cholera. Many of those victims were young children. The same report warned that if the war continued to 2030, the toll could reach 1.3 million.
In 2022, over 20 million people, around two-thirds of the population, needed humanitarian assistance, and millions were at risk of famine. Blockades, currency collapse and the destruction of roads, ports and water systems turned food and fuel shortages into a man-made crisis.
Jolie and the UN Refugee Agency
Jolie's link with UNHCR went back more than two decades. She became a Goodwill Ambassador in August 2001 after visiting refugee camps while filming abroad, and in April 2012 she was named Special Envoy, the first person to hold that role. Over the years she made dozens of field missions to refugees and displaced people in more than 30 countries. Yemen was not a new cause for her: in 2018 she had already urged world leaders to push for a ceasefire there.
In December 2022, later that same year, she stepped down from her UNHCR role, saying she would continue to advocate for refugees and human rights in other ways.
What happened after her visit
A few weeks after Jolie's trip, there was a rare moment of hope. On 2 April 2022 the UN brokered a two-month nationwide truce, which was extended in June and held, broadly, until it formally expired in October 2022. Fighting fell sharply during that period, and fuel ships and some commercial flights from Sanaa resumed. That April, Hadi also handed his powers to a new Presidential Leadership Council.
The truce did not bring a peace agreement, and Yemen's humanitarian needs remained vast. Jolie's appeal from Aden still stands as a useful reminder for anyone following world news: big new crises can push long-running ones out of view, but the people living through them do not stop needing help. For readers who want to support civilians, established agencies such as UNHCR, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and medical charities working in Yemen publish regular updates on their needs.
Sources: UNHCR on Twitter (6 March 2022); Upworthy; Al Jazeera (23 November 2021): UNDP death toll estimate; Wikipedia: Yemeni civil war (2014–present); Wikipedia: Angelina Jolie.
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