Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua via Creative Commons
A shoe is seen at the site of an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition in Sanaa, Yemen, on December 5, 2021.
In recent months, the war in Yemen saw a major burst of violence, featuring dramatic increases in military attacks, battlefield deaths, and civilian suffering, most of it receiving little attention in the United States.
As the world’s attention has focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Yemen Data Project has documented a large spike in air raids in Yemen, marking one of the largest escalations in the war over the past several years.
“Currently, we’re in a state of escalatory military action,” Timothy Lenderking, the U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen, said in a public address early last month.
The U.S. role has been so critical that some observers have suggested that the United States could end the war by ending its support of Saudi Arabia.
As the war intensified, it faded from public view, even as the suffering of the Yemeni people worsened. In one of the greatest blows to public oversight, the U.N. Human Rights Council ended the mandate of a U.N. expert panel on Yemen, which had been documenting human rights violations in the country.
“This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones,” Kathy Kelly wrote in The Progressive.
The war in Yemen has been raging for nearly a decade. Major parties to the war include the Houthis, who seized power in a revolution in 2014, and a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which launched a military intervention in 2015 with the goal of restoring the ousted Yemeni government to power. The United States backs the Saudi-led military coalition.
The war has created what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. More than twenty million people require humanitarian assistance. An estimated twelve million people are living in acute need, meaning that they need aid to sustain their livelihoods. More than four million people are internally displaced.
An estimated 377,000 people have died in the war. Nearly 60 percent of these deaths are due to the humanitarian crisis, which is making it nearly impossible for the Yemeni people to access food, water, and health care. Most of these indirect deaths have been young children, who have been devastated by malnutrition.
A study commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme estimates that, in 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five died every nine minutes due to factors related to the war.
“The situation is really devastating across the country and is going from worse to worse, and the recent spike in violence is worsening the very serious humanitarian situation,” Khalida Bouzar, a U.N. official, said early last month.
In Washington, D.C., many officials blame the Houthis for the crisis. Ned Price, a State Department spokesperson, said in January that the Houthis are the “one actor that is primarily responsible for the suffering of the Yemeni people.”
For years, U.S. officials have portrayed the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran. “You have seen us shine a bright spotlight on the level of support that Iran and Iran-backed groups are providing to the Houthis,” Price noted.
Other observers present a more nuanced view. According to Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. diplomat who is now a professor at Georgetown University, both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been propping up a government in Yemen that “has very little legitimacy and very little capacity within the country and in fact has been marked by corruption at a rather remarkable scale.” The Houthis, she explained early last month, “are more of an indigenous player,” even if they are receiving support from Iran.
In Bodine’s view, the Houthis do not depend on Iran as much as the ousted Yemeni government depends on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. “So you have a great imbalance,” she said.
For U.S. officials, a major concern is that a Houthi victory would make it difficult to control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the major chokepoints in the global energy trade. Every day, oil tankers carry more than six million barrels of oil and oil-related products through the strait.
“A possible stop in commercial shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait would have a significant impact on the world economy, and it is in all our interest to prevent such a spillage or stoppage,” U.S. military spokesperson William Urban said in 2020.
The United States has played a major role in the war. The Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations have all provided military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition. The U.S. role has been so critical that some observers have suggested that the United States could end the war by ending its support of Saudi Arabia.
“Yemenis rightfully blame the United States for this cataclysm,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said early last year.
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to stop arming the Saudi government, saying that he would make it into a “pariah.” Shortly after entering office, however, Biden hedged on his promise, deciding that he would only stop supporting offensive military operations. His qualification opened the door to ongoing military assistance to Saudi Arabia in the name of defense.
“The Biden Administration,” notes a report by the Congressional Research Service, “has not publicly clarified what it means by its decision to no longer support Saudi-led coalition offensive operations in Yemen, or what its defensive support to Saudi Arabia entails.”
Perhaps the most significant military development came in early 2021 when the Houthis began a military offensive to capture Marib, an oil-rich area that is the last major northern stronghold of the Saudi-backed government. The region is critically important to Yemen’s energy needs, with both ExxonMobil and Total SA having interests in the area.
As the Houthis began gaining ground last November, some observers began predicting that the war would soon be over.
“If they defeat the Saudi-backed Yemeni national army in one of its last major strongholds in the north and take control of the energy center of Yemen, the Houthis would essentially have won the war,” commented David Schenker, a former U.S. official.
Once the Houthis began approaching a military victory, however, the Saudi-led coalition responded with a major counter-offensive, launching air and ground campaigns that began reversing Houthi gains.
As the Saudi-led coalition prepared its counter-offensive, the Biden Administration announced a major arms deal for Saudi Arabia, once again claiming that the support was defensive in nature. Some officials, including U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, tried to stop the deal, but they could not overcome the widespread support for Saudi Arabia in Washington.
“Exporting more missiles to Saudi Arabia does nothing but further this conflict and pour more gasoline on an already raging fire,” Sanders warned last December.
In recent months, the war has spread into additional areas. The Houthis have launched air attacks against the United Arab Emirates, prompting the United States to increase its military presence in the region.
In late January, the Saudi-led coalition launched a barrage of airstrikes that killed as many as one hundred people. One of the strikes hit a detention facility, killing an estimated seventy people. Another strike hit a telecommunications hub, taking the country’s Internet offline while killing several children who were playing nearby.
As the fighting has intensified, U.S. officials have largely kept quiet about the war. Most U.S. leaders avert their eyes from its horrors, unwilling to acknowledge that young Yemeni children are suffering terribly.
“The world can no longer stand idly by as Yemenis suffer from a lack of access to the most basic services,” U.N. official Bouzar said. “We must work together on ending the war and on ending the war now.”