Yemen: Girl recovers from malnutrition

This image of 18-year-old Saida Ahmad Baghili, sitting on her bed at Al-Thawra in the Red Sea Port city of Hodeida shows her malnourished, emaciated body. It has come to stand for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Saida was transferred to a hospital in the capital, Sanaa. After weeks of hospital care, she can at least smile, though she can still barely speak and continues to find eating difficult at times. Her father is still worried: "She doesn't eat anything except liquid medical food. She used to drink juice and milk with bananas but now she can't. We don't know when she'll recover."

Doctors believe her condition has damaged her throat. When her family first brought Saida to a hospital, she could barely keep her eyes open or stand. "We admitted Saida to find out the cause of her inability to eat," her doctor said. "Her health issue remains chronic and her bones remain fragile due to stunted growth. In all likelihood, they will never return to normal."

Her father, Ahmed, who is staying nearby to be with his daughter, said his daughter's weight has reached 16 kilograms (35 pounds), five kilos more than when she was first admitted to hospital. He said Saida's situation was alarming before the war, which began in March 2015. Yemen's crisis including widespread hunger was brought on by decades of poverty and internal strife.

About half of Yemen's 28 million people are "food insecure," according to the United Nations, and 7 million of them do not now where they will get their next meal. The US-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network, run by the US Agency for International Development, estimated that a quarter of all Yemenis are probably in a food security "emergency" - one stage before "catastrophe" or famine.

The war has pushed the Arab world's poorest nation to the brink of famine and displaced over three million people. Areas worst affected by the conflict are parts of Taiz province and southern coastal areas of the Hodeida province, where Saida is from.

Restrictions imposed on the entry of ships after the start of the war in Yemen had raised insurance premiums and cut the number of vessels entering the port by more than half. About a million tons of food supplies entered through Hodeida in 2015, a third as much as in 2014.

Yemeni women are holding banners depicting suffering, malnourished children. They protest against a UN roadmap for the Yemen conflict, which is calling for naming a new vice president after the withdrawal of the Houthi rebels from Sanaa. Since the beginning of the war, at least 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen.