Somalia, Yemen, Iraq.

Today's three stories you should know.

Mar 20, 2023

Somalia

Today, the horrifying news that an estimated 43,000 people - about half of them children under five - died during Somalia’s drought last year and it’s relegated to a footnote in the international news agenda. Proximities has mentioned several times before that stories of hunger are too often under-reported. Death tolls, which are usually published months after the hunger crisis itself, suffer the same fate. “The current crisis is far from over,” a report released today by the World Health Organization and the UN children’s agency said, projecting that at least 18,000 people, and as many as 34,000, will die in the first six months of this year. Will this ongoing catastrophe make the top headlines? There is absolutely no chance of that.

Yemen

The warring sides in Yemen’s conflict today said that they had agreed to a prisoner swap in what could be the latest sign that there are hopes for an end to the gruelling nine-year-long war. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels said they would free 181 detainees, including 15 Saudis and three Sudanese, in exchange for 706 prisoners from the Saudi-backed government. Hopes for a resolution to the conflict, which has killed more than 150,000 people, have been heightened by the restoring of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia who have been using Yemen to wage a proxy war.

Iraq

It is 20 years today since the US invaded Iraq, unleashing a wave of violence that continues to this day, destabilizing the Middle East, directly and indirectly killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and giving birth to ISIS and other extremist groups. Iraq is still struggling to recover. There is a lot of good coverage around - written pieces, videos and Twitter threads. There is also, unsurprisingly, a lot of bad coverage, and a lot of shameless pundits trying to rewrite history. A good place to start is with this Al Jazeera timeline/refresher on the invasion and what was to come after.