In besieged Taiz, the rubbish burns and the poor breathe the war

According to Al Jazeera, the residents of Taiz, a Yemeni city under siege, face growing health risks: waste is piling up, collection is hampered by sniper fire, and people are reduced to burning rubbish in the streets. The smoke adds to the danger. The report does not give us here any figures we can verify on waste volumes, recorded illnesses or the precise responsibility for the interruption of the service; we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the dispatch.

A heap of rubbish is not a municipal detail. It is the most visible marker of the collapse of a public service, and that collapse never strikes at random. Whoever has the means buys water, moves away from the front, leaves the exposed neighbourhood. Whoever does not stays beside the heap, breathes what is burning and sends the children to play further off, hoping the sniper is somewhere else. The siege redistributes risk, and it redistributes it downwards.

We readily speak of a "humanitarian crisis", as though it were a weather event. But a war is not a climate. It has actors, weapons, suppliers, sponsors. Yemen has for years become a theatre where regional powers clash and where arms from far away are sold and delivered. The dispatch does not detail these chains of intervention, but the question arises: who decides that a city of civilians can be held under the threat of gunmen, and who pays the health bill?

The notion of dependency sheds some light on this landscape. A country kept poor, whose infrastructure is fragile and whose economy relies on outside support, has no buffer when war arrives. No reserves, no rescue network, no state able to guarantee collection when the street becomes a firing line. War does not create all the vulnerability; it reveals and worsens it.

There is also a bitter irony in the image: people burning their waste for lack of anything better, while the world that fuels the conflict talks of "risk management" in its drawing rooms. The people of Taiz are not managing a risk, they are enduring it. With matches, they do the work a public service can no longer perform.

What we do not yet know: how many districts are affected, which organisations are trying to keep collection going, what aid actually arrives. These are the questions to put to local authorities, humanitarian agencies and the belligerents. What we do know, however, is that the smoke of Taiz is no accident: it is the consequence of a siege, and a siege is a decision.