A news report from December 2018 lays bare the depths of the crisis gripping Yemen. Mothers watch doctors measure the arms of their children. “When the tape shows red,” the TV correspondent narrates, “it means they’re severely malnourished.” After more than four years of civil war and proxy conflict, these Yemeni children, mothers, and doctors are trapped in what the UN has called “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time”.

Yemeni fighters with an Emirati-backed separatist militia take aim from their lookout point in Aden in March 2017

The report was first shown on the American TV programme PBS NewsHour. The footage is shocking. Yet Sana’a-based photographer Amira Al-Sharif came across a social media comment on the story that took her breath away:

“Why do these [Yemeni] women continue to have babies knowing they can’t feed them?”

She was infuriated. “It’s not enough for the [UK- and US-supported, Saudi-led] coalition to bring Yemen death and destruction – now we, Yemeni women, shouldn’t bring new life into the world?” said Al-Sharif.

Clockwise from top left: a mother turns to a traditional healer in Husseiniya district as medical care becomes inaccessible; Emirati tanks on a bridge in Aden; Huda’s family of eight have just one piece of bread a day between them to eat; Huda, a volunteer schoolteacher, collects water for her family

She recited the latest death toll figures in her motherland, as if in rebuttal. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, more than 60,000 people – including thousands of civilians young and old – have been directly killed by the war since 2016; meanwhile, Save the Children estimates that 85,000 children under the age of five may have died from extreme hunger or disease.

“Babies are life in return for all those killed by the war,” said the photographer, who has 12 young nieces and nephews in Sana’a, the Houthi-held capital of Yemen. “Babies are hope.”

A family enjoying the water available on a banana plantation

Over the following few weeks, Al-Sharif pulled together a body of photographs on the theme of motherhood, styling the collection Mothers Being Mothers. Scenes of Yemeni women embracing their children are interspersed with those of either Emirati-backed or Iranian-aligned militiamen wielding their weapons.

An image of the photographer’s nieces and nephews, taken before the Saudi-led bombing began in their neighbourhood

A tight-knit group of smiling children – her nieces and nephews – are seen posing against the cityscape of Sana’a, six years before the UK- and US-supported, Saudi-led coalition first bombed their neighbourhood. And, in one of the final scenes, below, a youngster is seen dropping a Yemeni riyal into the hollowed-out mouth of a cardboard figure of then-UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, outside the UN offices in Sana’a. (At the time, June 2016, Ban had recently removed Saudi Arabia from the UN’s blacklist of child killers, citing threats of defunding from the kingdom, one of his organisation’s top donors in the region.)

Bombing destroyed this home in Sana’a old town, killing a family of 10 including eight children

As Mothers Being Mothers came into being, Elham Hassan, a Sana’a-based writer, mother of three and longtime colleague of Al-Sharif, got involved.

“What is required of people who are living in warzones?” Hassan asked. She went on to confront, just as Al-Sharif’s aching series had, the entrenched logic of the west and the crisis-ravaged rest – in particular, the lethal duplicity of world leaders like the UK and US, who give aid to wartorn Yemen with one hand while selling weapons to the Saudi-led coalition with the other.

Together, the three women adapted Hassan’s verbal arguments into the following open letter, entitled Surrender Life to War?

“Why do we, Yemeni women, continue to have babies knowing we’ll struggle to feed them? Firstly, we’re only doing the same thing that women around the world do: have families.

“Tell me, what is required of people who are living in warzones? To surrender life to war? To bury ourselves alive because none of us know when the war will end? The beneficiaries of the war – those selling the weapons – are the ones who know. When they feel full, maybe then our children will, too.

Toy money at a market in Sana’a

“In the Houthi-held north, where I and millions of Yemenis live, we have seen the worst of the economic warfare being waged by our country’s Saudi-backed government. The currency has collapsed. Civil servants aren’t being paid. Food and medicine are either too expensive or scarce. Airstrikes, blockades, darkness. If the beneficiaries – the international powers – believe that they’re not the ones who should be responsible for feeding Yemeni children, then they’re responsible for their starvation in one way or another. [Yemen was already one of the poorest countries in the world before the catastrophic and criminal war, the mass starvation, and the greatest cholera epidemic in recorded history.]

“Just like mothers around the world, we feel happy when our children eat and worried when they don’t. We, too, want our children to be healthy and grow; we want them to live. War complicates that. Most Yemeni children struggle with a loss of appetite due to lack of food. Their bodies are weak. Yes, us Yemeni mothers know that we’re failing our children, but we also know that the international powers are failing us.

A truck carrying Houthi militiamen in Sana’a

“Unfortunately, failure strikes us again and again: Yemenis young and old who are in pain – crying in pain – can’t find medicine. Mothers are sending pictures of their sick or injured children to people in their neighbourhoods asking for help in locating and affording medicine. They can’t afford one needle to alleviate their son’s pain, let alone an operation to help their daughter walk. ‘As long as you’re living in a poor, wartorn country where food and medicine are out of reach,’ you’ll tell us, ‘don’t have babies.’

“But the sad truth is that the luxury of your babies’ lives is based so much on the misery of our babies’ lives. ‘Why are international powers making our families hungry?’ we ask you. ‘Is it because your governments continue to sell the Saudi coalition weapons that are used to maim and murder us? Is it because [the kingdom] is paying the world to stay silent?’

“The story of the war isn’t the Houthis trying to take over Yemen – no, it’s the international powers making Yemenis hungry. Ask us once more: ‘Why do Yemeni women keep having babies?’ And we’ll reply: ‘Why do international powers keep making war?’”

A displaced family in a makeshift camp in Hodeidah.

• Elle Kurancid is a writer based in Cairo. Elham Hassan is a writer and mother of three based in Sana’a. Amira Al-Sharif is a photographer in her native Yemen

• This article was amended on 11 April 2019 to clarify details about the nature and timing of the project.