A civil war in Yemen has devastated the nation and its water infrastructure. The government of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi is engaged in an ongoing conflict over the fate of the nation with Houthi rebel forces.  Since March 2015, more than 6,800 people have been killed, and 35,000 people who have been injured.^[1]  Amid this devastation, the nation’s water infrastructure has also been under attack.^[2]

A list of alleged attacks on Yemeni water infrastructure includes a January 2016 attack on a seawater desalination plant located north of Mocha; four attacks in April 2015 on water equipment, water companies, and water tanks; and a December 2015 attack on a Coca Cola factory in the capital, Sana’a.^[3]

As reported on Bellingcat.com, access to clean water is a daily struggle for 14.7 million people—roughly 50 percent of Yemen’s population. The nation’s water deficit is increasing on an annual basis due to several interrelated factors—including an increasing population, poor water management, and climate change.^[4]

In one of the country’s most important cities, known as Taiz, the local population lost its sole supply of clean water when a Saudi-led coalition destroyed the Mocha desalination plant.  In Hajja, another Saudi-led airstrike destroyed the Al-Sham water-bottling plant and killed 13 people—minutes before the end of the work day.^[5]  A few days after the attack, the water plant’s owner, Ibrahim al-Razoom, stood among “the strewn bottles, smoldering boxes and pulverized machines”—trying to understand why his facility had become a target. “Nothing in the ruins suggested the factory was used for making bombs, as a coalition spokesman had claimed. And it was far from any military facility that would explain the strike as a tragic mistake: For miles around, there was nothing but scrub.”^[6]

^{Credit: BBC}

This violence has exacerbated the nation’s existing water crisis.  An old report in Yemen’s pro-government newspaper, Al-Thrawra, states that 70-80 percent of conflicts in the country’s rural areas are about water; while the Yemini Ministry of the Interior “says that 4,000 die each year in violent disputes over land and water.”  As reported in The Guardian, these numbers are old, and likely underestimate what has become an even more dire water situation.^[7]

Several studies suggest that people living in the capital, Sana’a, may lose access to fresh water “within a decade or as soon as 2017.”^[8] According to Christopher Ward, an expert on Yemen’s water crisis, it would cost more than USD $2.1 billion to create the infrastructure that would provide all Yemeni households with access to clean water.  As of now, state-run water companies supply water to only a fraction of households in the country’s major cities. In Sana’a, only 40 percent of the households are connected to the water-grid, and the outdated pipe network eliminates any chance of having a reliable water supply.

^{Credit: The Guardian and Bryan Denton/Corbis}

Water experts state that Yemen’s multi-faceted water crisis will require a combination of solutions—including the construction of dams, pipes, wells, and desalination plants; improved water purification techniques; and rainwater harvesting methods in the mountains (which would draw from the region’s ancient tradition of water conservation).^[9]