WD | M iddle East
Fighting Not to Be Forgotten Five Years After Saudi-Led Intervention, Yemen Remains Mired in Suffering and Stalemate BY JONATHAN GORVETT
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his month marks five years since Houthi rebels took over the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and then pushed south, triggering a military intervention by neighboring Saudi Arabia and its Arab coalition partners. Since then, the country has become a staging ground for one of the world’s worst — and most overlooked — conflicts and humanitarian disasters. While accurate figures are hard to gather, the respected Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project (ACLED) estimates that the death toll has surpassed 100,000 since 2015, including over 20,000 deaths in 2019 alone and some 12,000 civilians killed in directly targeted attacks since 2015. The war has also seen one of the worst outbreaks of cholera in modern times, along with widespread malnutrition and a host of associated diseases and otherwise preventable deaths. According to the U.N., over 24 million people — 80 percent of the population — are in need of humanitarian aid and protection, making Yemen the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Meanwhile, the country continues to be a battleground for U.S. operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and, more recently, the Islamic State. Yet, despite the horror — and widespread war fatigue among Yemen’s various combatants — a comprehensive settlement still appears elusive. On the contrary, aid workers and analysts fear that the conflict is now settling into a protracted stalemate, with local deals serving as a poor substitute for a lasting peace. “Today, Yemen is a no-war, no-peace state, which I suspect could be sustainable for another four years, without a genuine will for peace,” said Yemen analyst Sama’a Al Hamdani, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute. That’s largely because the war is essentially a proxy for the wider battle between Iran and the Saudi-UAE alliance — and between Iran and the United States. “Solving this is the key to de-escalation throughout the region,” Al Hamdani said. So, while there was a tiny glimmer of hope in February when a U.N.-administered medical flight was allowed to carry seven seriously ill patients out of Sana’a airport — the result of months of negotiations with Saudi Arabia to lift its blockade of Yemeni air space — until such efforts become part of a bigger settlement, millions of Yemenis will continue to suffer.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
In a land riven by competing tribes,
12 | THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT | MARCH 2020
PHOTO: ALESSIO ROMENZI / UNICEF
As rain approaches, a girl removes clothes hanging from the line outside her family’s tent in a camp for internally displaced persons on the outskirts of Kharem, Yemen, on July 22, 2019. According to the U.N., more than 24 million people — some 80% of Yemen’s population — are in need of humanitarian assistance, including more than 12 million children.
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Saudi Arabia wants to get out of the conflict because of the reputational damage the war and the humanitarian crisis is doing to it. But it needs some kind of win in order to do so.
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SAMA’A AL HAMDANI, non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute
militias and outside powers, Yemenis are all too familiar with war and suffering. It was only in 1990, after decades of civil war, that the independent northern and southern states united to form the modern republic of Yemen, with strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh taking over the impoverished country. A wily political operative who ruled for over 30 years, Saleh was forced to resign during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and was replaced by Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who came to power as part of a deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council. Meanwhile, the northern-based Houthis, who follow the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam and make up about a third of population, have long chafed under Sunni-majority rule — both at the hands of Saleh and later his replacement. After a series of clashes and protests over fuel prices and political representation, the Houthis advanced on the
capital and ousted President Hadi’s internationally recognized government in 2015. Hadi fled to exile in Saudi Arabia, which promptly launched a bombing campaign to restore him to power. For decades, Saudi Arabia has inserted itself into Yemen’s various political and military disputes to exert influence over its southern neighbor, which controls the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a strategic chokepoint for the global transit of oil. The Houthi takeover in 2015 sparked fears in the Sunni kingdom that its Shiite archrival Iran would gain a foothold next door. While the Houthis were nominally aligned with Iran in the early stages of the conflict, many experts say Saudi Arabia exaggerated claims of Tehran’s ties with the rebel group. But eventually those ties hardened as the fighting dragged on and the conflict devolved into a regional proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The decision to mobilize a coalition of Arab states to intervene in Yemen
was spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s young de facto ruler, who has moved aggressively to contain Iran and consolidate power at home. While initially hailed as a reformer, Salman has since come under fire for a series of controversial, and clumsy, missteps — among them, orchestrating a largely unsuccessful blockade of Qatar; purging wealthy Saudi princes and businessmen under the guise of tackling corruption; and allegedly ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist for The Washington Post. Most recently, Salman has become embroiled in accusations that he was involved in hacking the phone of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Post. But Saudi Arabia’s brutal military campaign in Yemen has drawn perhaps the fiercest international condemnation — even from Riyadh’s traditional Republican backers in Congress. The Saudi-led coalition has been accused of indiscriminately bombing civilians
