[custom_adv] Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie on Sunday visited war-ravaged Yemen to show solidarity with displaced families in hopes of mobilising support for an incoming fundraising conference, the United Nations said. [custom_adv] Jolie, who is special envoy for the UN on refugee issues, landed in the southern coastal city of Aden to meet families and refugees there. Aden is the seat of the internationally recognised government.The UN refugee agency said it hopes that Jolie’s visit would draw attention to growing humanitarian needs in Yemen, the Arab World’s poorest country, ahead of the annual High Level Pledging Conference for Yemen on March 16. [custom_adv] “As we continue to watch the horrors unfolding in Ukraine and call for an immediate end to the conflict and humanitarian access, I am here in Yemen to support people who also desperately need peace. The situation here is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world,” Jolie said in a post on her Instagram account. [custom_adv] Also on Sunday, an armed group kidnapped two foreigners working with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Yemen’s east, a government source said, as the charity confirmed it had “lost contact” with some staff.“An armed group kidnapped two MSF workers, one a German national and the other Mexican, in Hadramawt,” a Yemeni interior ministry source told Agence France-Presse, adding that a “military campaign” was underway to track down the kidnappers. [custom_adv] Hadramawt is a large Yemeni province under the control of the internationally recognised government.MSF on Sunday confirmed that it had “lost contact with some of our staff in Yemen”.“Out of concern for the safety of our colleagues we cannot share more details at this point,” the medical aid group said. [custom_adv] Yemen has been convulsed by civil war since 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels took control of the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led coalition, backed at the time by the United States, entered the war in 2015 to try to restore Yemen’s government to power. [custom_adv] The conflict has since become a regional proxy war that has killed more than 150,000 people, including over 14.500 civilians, according to 2022 data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Project. It also created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
