Hollywood Actress Angelina Jolie in Yemen ahead of Fundraising Summit

On Sunday, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie visited war-wrecked Yemen to show solidarity with displaced families in hopes of mobilizing support for an incoming fundraising conference, the United Nations said.

Jolie, who is a special envoy for the U.N. on refugee issues, landed in the southern coastal city of Aden to meet with families and refugees there. Aden is the seat of the internationally recognized government.

The U.N. 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.

“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.

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.