Yemen's war on body parts sparks cottage industry in prosthetic limbs

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Yemen’s civil war and the prosthetic limb industry

A look at how Yemen’s brutal civil war is creating a market for prosthetic limbs.

MAR’IB, Yemen – Outside a quiet, rundown building on the edge of the city, a few young boys hobble quietly in the hot afternoon sun. Each is missing a vital part of their body – a hand, a leg, an arm.

Inside that building is new hope for each: Prosthetic limbs are being cut, carved, melted and molded.

A young patient recently outfitted with a new leg waits for his training session outside the Ma'rib prosthetics center in Yemen. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

“Sometimes I go to my office to cry for each of these miserable stories,” Dr. Haitham Ahmed Ali Ahmed, a Sudanese volunteer with Physicians Across Continents, told Fox News. “It isn’t fair, but we do whatever we can to give them another chance.”

Such an undertaking has become an all too common craft in the country battered by nearly three years of intense conflict between a Saudi Arabia-led coalition intent on restoring the internationally recognized Yemen government, and the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels who have taken over strategic ports and cities.

Demand for new limbs is so high in Yemen that on-site facilities had to be created as the war drags on. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

The market for prosthetics became so high that opening an in-house facility - complete with a warehouse of materials and tool workshop - was deemed a necessity. The Ma’rib center opened next to the General Hospital in February 2017, and in one year alone, 305 prosthetic limbs were fitted to more than 195 victims.

8-year-old Mohammad waits in the hope he will receive a new arm. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

The waiting room is filled with tiny children, revealing stumps where there were once arms and legs. The kids cling to their fathers, who often have lost a limb as well. There are niether tears nor screams.

In an adjacent private room, stocked high with body part-making supplies, a burka-clad 26-year-old woman sits with a female medical professional as she has measurements taken for a new hand to be sketched and sculpted.

“The beneficiary comes in, we complete a form about their injury and we take the measurements. Then after a few days they come back for the first fitting and training,” explained Dr. Mohammed Abdo Al-Qubati, head of the Saudi King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Foundation (KS Relief) funded prosthetics center. “After five days of training, they can get their new limb.”

Mohammad Abdul Aziz, a bus driver from Sana'a, trains with his new leg below the knee. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

The training process is fraught with challenges. One 33-year-old man, Mohammad Abdul Aziz, wearily hauls himself upright as he grips two wooden bars on either side of him – struggling to try and walk again with a new artificial leg, below the knee. Eight months ago, the bus driver from Yemen’s capital Sana’a lost his leg in an attack.

“I just want to go back to work again for my family,” Aziz mutters.

Demand for artificial limbs is nationwide. The technology deployed to various on-site factories in Yemen is often reported to be new. But materials are generally outdated – meaning even small children have no choice but to be outfitted with limbs that are weighty, hardly functional, and seemingly cosmetic.

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Accurate data is impossible to come by, but it's anticipated more than a thousand children are now in need of prosthetics, with the number rising almost daily. And as for who is to blame for the carnage, there's enough for both sides.

The Saudi-led coalition has been widely accused by human rights groups and much of the international community of indiscriminate targeting in its aerial campaign. The opposing Houthis, too, have been blamed for haphazard shelling, and leaving the country littered in landmines, exposing Yemenis not only to fatal threats now, but for generations.

Saudi Arabia claims more than 600,000 mines have been discovered in areas now liberated from Houthi control, along with more than 130,000 globally prohibited sea mines. As a result, more than 1,500 deaths have been recorded, and at least 4,000 injured or permanently disabled.

Several children from Sana'a, now at a displacement camp near Ma'rib, are in desperate need of medical attention. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

Most of the victims are said to be women, children and the elderly.

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“Sixty percent of the cases are due to mines,” Al-Qubati said. “Thirty percent from road accidents, and the rest mostly from gun shots.”

Displacement camp for Yemenis fleeing the fighting. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

Yemen was considered the poorest country in the Middle East even before the war. Sustained conflict has only spiraled the nation into a further cycle of hunger, disease, poverty, death and destruction.

Child holds a baby suffering from malnutrition in Yemen. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

The specialists at the Ma’rib center are mostly from nearby Middle East countries, including Turkey and Syria. But Yemenis are in the process of being trained, with the ultimate goal being for them to soon run the facility on their own.

Meanwhile, at a nearby camp, several Yemenis caught in the crossfire have been left disabled. Their lives appear frozen, as they attempt to get through the day with lost limbs, living in arid conditions, the notion of even receiving a manufactured body part something of a faraway luxury.

Several young boys from Sana'a were wounded after playing with what turned out to be a landmine. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

There are no schools or medical clinics or work opportunities in the tent-dotted patch of dust. Daily life revolves around waiting for the stalemate war to end. There's also a waiting list of at least 10 other families waiting for space to open up in the closed camp.

In one case, a wheelchair-bound mother and son await further medical help - which they fear will never come. Little boys without arms sit nearby, in some moments laughing with one another, at other times staring in silence.

Aid workers from Saudi's KS Relief Foundation endeavor to lift the spirits of displaced children in Ma'rib, Yemen. (Fox News/Hollie McKay)

“They went outside to play with something,” said one camp worker from KS Relief. “But it turned out to be a bomb.”

On top of their already dire disabilities, the threat of malnutrition, cholera, chicken pox and diphtheria looms for all the Yemenis – young and old – stuffed into small, dusty tents.

“We are trying to help with the limbs and the injuries you can see,” adds another worker. “But it’s the ones you can’t – the trauma, the persecution, running from home, in many ways that is almost harder to heal.”