The Burdened

Yemen, once a beautiful land identified with the Queen of Sheba, is now one of the worst ongoing humanitarian disasters of modern times

- Swati Subhedar

AN image clicked in 2017 still haunts Ali Al-Senaidar, a photographer based in Old Sanaa, Yemen. He remembers the faces of the two boys—aged 13-14—very clearly. One boy, wearing a blue thawb (robe), is walking alongside his father on a near-empty street. Both father and son are holding hands; both arecasually carrying Kalashnikovs on their shoulders and are walking away from the camera. Walking towards the camera is another boy, of the same age, wearing olive green pants and a shirt, hands in his pocket, hair neatly combed and a school bag on his shoulder. The boy wearing thawb turns and looks at the boy with the school bag. A range of emotions is seen in his eyes—sadness, deprivation, envy. At that very moment, Al-Senaidar clicks the image. Little did he know that it would haunt him for a long time.

“The contrast between childhood innocence and the reality of war affected me deeply,” he says. The image stayed with him for many days. “To cope with the emotional trauma, I decided to express my feelings through my lens. My aim is to document such painful moments to raise awareness because the situation in Yemen is bad,” he adds.

The Middle East has been on edge for many years now. “Presently, all eyes are on Syria, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. People think that the situation in Yemen is stable, but it’s not. It’s getting worse by the day. Yemen must not be forgotten,” says Ahmad Algohbary, a Yemeni journalist who moved to the Netherlands recently because covering the conflict and telling heartbreaking stories became too emotionally draining for him.