Yemen’s misery is absolute – how it came to this
The statistics of misery from Yemen are on a scale that match any other sinkhole of human desolation in the world. The civil war – in this phase at least – has been running for ten years. The number killed by violent action is somewhere between a quarter and a third of a million, out of a population of just over 29 million.
Of that 29 million, somewhere around 24 million are dependent on aid of one form or another. They cannot feed themselves and at least a million are at the point of starvation. Aid is getting harder to come by because the main port of Hodeida is under a permanent on-off siege by the warring parties. Water, too, is scarce with the capital Sana’a predicted to run out of natural water resources very soon.
The prospect is that Yemen will become an incurable crisis point with little semblance of peace or political harmony for decades to come. It’s an outlook the people of Yemen now share with Syria, Somalia, Kashmir and Afghanistan – a condition of chronic and subclinical conflict.
A deteriorating situation is being made even worse by the onset of Covid-19.
Yemen is in a highly strategic position in terms of geography and geopolitics. Yet why are so many nations and powers now looking away? The UN Secretary General has just appealed for an emergency aid fund for Yemen of $3.89 billion. António Guterres did not hold back this week in venting his rage and disappointment at the donors’ offer of $1.7 billion – less than half the sum requested. He added that he thought that up to 16 million people now faced starvation in one form or another in the months ahead.
Britain has been a generous donor until now, giving over £214 million last year. This week the minister in charge of aid, James Cleverly, said this was to be cut to £87 million this year as part of the reduction in the overall UK aid budget from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.51 per cent. On the other hand, the UK is to continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, very likely to be used in the war in Yemen. When it comes to foreign support, the concept of Global Britain has its very own notion of variable geometry.
The Biden administration has said it will halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia for weapons that could harm civilians in Yemen – meaning cluster munitions and fragmentation bombs and projectiles. There has also been talk of cutting back on drone operations in a region where CIA as well as military drones have been used extensively over the years.
Neither the UK or US administrations seem to be offering anything serious in terms of negotiation or any other form of diplomatic path out of the bloody impasse. Yemen, however, is vital ground for both London and Washington and their allies. Wrapped into the civil war led by the Shia Houthis on the one hand, and the ragbag alliance of Sunni former government supporters on the other, is a faceoff between Iran and Saudi Arabia in their backyard. Add to this alliances of the Gulf Arabs and Egypt, with Turkey, Russia and China all taking an interest. All recognise that Yemen guards vital sea lanes – this after all is what brought the British into the picture roughly two centuries ago.
The Bab al Mandab strait is the choke point of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It controls access to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. Aden itself is a crucial logistics point, the strategic coaling station for the passage to India. It is of keen interest to newer forces. In October 2000 guerrillas blew a hole in the USS Cole, anchored in the outer harbour, killing 17 crew. It was a trial run by al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington the following year.
Today, the waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al Mandab are the playground of pirates and Mafiosi. This past week a gang threw overboard a cargo of 80 refugees hoping to flee Djibouti for Yemen.
Yemen has been the setting for ethnic, ideological and tribal conflict and vendetta through much of its history. In a way it has been downhill since the happier Roman times when it basked in the name of ‘Arabia Felix’ (happy Arabia), the fertile land, as opposed to the grimmer Arabia Deserta – desert Arabia. In the 17th century it was the prime source for coffee, the provincial capital of Mocha becoming one of the most famous coffee brand names.
Some of the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed moved into Yemen during his lifetime – and Islam has informed much of the country’s story ever since. In the 19th century the country was divided, with oversight by the Ottoman Empire in the north and the British running Aden as a protectorate in the south. From independence in the late sixties, the country was split into the separate North and South Yemen, and much of that division persists. In 1990 the two halves came together as a single political entity with Ali Abdullah Saleh as the first president. He was to rule for 33 years, being deposed in 2012.
It is here that the present phase of civil war, and worse, begins. Saleh was pushed out by an insurgency from the north led by a Zaidi Shia movement, Ansar Allah. From 2004 the movement was led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi – hence the more common name for both the movement, and now the regime in Sana’a, the Houthis. As Zaidi Shias, the Houthis have a complex relationship with the Sunni Saudis, not least the ruling house in Saudi Arabia. They are “fiver” Shiites as opposed to the more mainstream “twelver” Shiites – in that they acknowledge the first five Shia Imams descended from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, whereas the twelvers acknowledged the twelve descendants, to whom they ascribe superhuman qualities. The Zaidis are more open about the Imams’ and their succession. For instance, they do not believe in the mainstream Shia doctrine of dissembling – taqiyya.
The Saudi government and royal house have always seen the Houthis as a threat, on grounds of clan and faith, and particularly because of their alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran which has provided arms and training. In September 2019, the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone attack on two key Saudi Aramco installations at Abqaiq and Khurais, knocking out half the Saudi oilfield output for several weeks. They also claimed to have launched a missile on installations near Jeddah in the past week. Both would have been the work of Iranian crews, operational planners and targeters.
At the same time, the clan of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda, was partly Yemeni and Yemen has been a training ground and sanctuary for the grouping known as ‘Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’, or AQAP. In 2011, a CIA drone strike killed the militant preacher Ayman al-Awlaki, a brilliant recruiter and groomer for the Islamic State, who was hiding in south east Yemen. Later his teenage son and successor was killed in the same way.
By 2014, the Houthi insurgents took over the capital Sana’a, forcing Saleh’s successor as president, Adrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to flee in 2015 and set up a government in exile in Aden. Saleh himself ran out of luck; despite trying to reconcile with the Houthis, he was killed in 2017.
In Aden, Hadi is now threatened by a local breakaway insurgencies of southern warlords.
The Houthi coup in Sana’a brought direct intervention in 2015 by Saudi forces and eight allies, including the UAE. America leant support, manning control centres and headquarters. But the UAE has become increasingly reluctant. Despite the copious aerial bombing and rocket attacks the Saudis and their proxies have not fared too well.
In Sana’a itself the Houthis have run a brutal and oppressive regime, accused of torture, mass disappearances and detention of enemies. Civil rights groups, led by the “widows of Yemen” regularly protest about the disappearance of loved ones – and Amnesty International has taken up their cause.
Despite the privations, the lack of water, food and housing, the Houthis are advancing. These past few weeks they have begun threatening Marib, the Saudi supply point on the northern tip of what used to be Southern Yemen. It controls the advance on Sana’a – just 30 miles away across the mountains. But Marib, which had the appearance of the fly-tipping capital of the world when I visited two years ago, demonstrates the Achilles’ heel of the Saudi effort in Yemen.
The Saudi concept of operations in Yemen is flawed by the inability of the kingdom and its allies to put forces on the ground in a meaningful way. The war cannot be won from the air alone, no more than it could in Libya in 2011 when Cameron and Sarkozy had their go at humanitarian intervention. Air attack is at a big disadvantage in the mixed and difficult physical and human terrain of Yemen. Without a powerful ground force presence, Marib is vulnerable. If Marib goes, the Saudi strategy for Yemen, driven largely by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, goes with it.
And Britain remains a prime Saudi backer. “After all, Saudi Arabia has kept the British military aerospace industry afloat for the past twenty-five years,” a senior serving British officer put it to me a few weeks ago.
If Marib and the south fall to the Houthis in the next few weeks, we all could be in a very different game altogether. The consequences will be felt well beyond the highlands of Yemen and the contested, congested waters of the Bab al-Mandab straits and its surrounding Arabian and African waters and coastlines.