{"id":36113,"date":"2017-12-06T13:08:18","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T02:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=36113"},"modified":"2017-12-06T13:08:18","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T02:08:18","slug":"yemen-war-without-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/yemen-war-without-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Yemen: war without end?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

On 4 December, Houthi rebels in Yemen killed former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. A few days earlier, Saleh had ended his three-year-old alliance with the Houthis and sought to re-establish relations with Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Saleh\u2019s death is bound to complicate the ongoing crisis in Yemen. The country is already experiencing the \u2018worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world<\/a>\u2019 with an estimated 7 million people facing severe food shortages and starvation. Saleh\u2019s son, Ahmed, will probably take over as leader of the General People\u2019s Congress political party. He\u2019s unlikely to seek a ceasefire, though. Instead, it\u2019s more likely that he\u2019ll try to form an alliance with President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, his father\u2019s successor and former vice-president. Hadi had said prior to Saleh\u2019s death that he would support \u2018any party confronting Houthi terrorist gangs<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

The political scientist William Zartman has argued that parties to a dispute opt to negotiate<\/a> only when they are ready to do so. This moment of \u2018ripeness\u2019 may be brought on by a \u2018mutually hurting stalemate\u2019 in which all parties recognise that they\u2019re locked in a conflict they can\u2019t win. A negotiated peace becomes the only way out.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia\u2014the primary protagonists\u2014has a clear path to victory. They remain unaffected by the conflict in Yemen. Each believes that it\u2019s pursuing its own national interest. The suffering of Yemen\u2019s population matters little to them.<\/p>\n

In the case of Saudi Arabia, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, has noted<\/a> that \u2018Riyadh does not have a strategy to win the war\u2019. It has opted for a strategy of attrition, disease and famine to wear down its opponents.<\/p>\n

However, Iran is well versed in attrition warfare. It\u2019s happy to support its Houthi allies for as long as necessary because it recognises the value of having a pro-Tehran government in Sana\u2019a. And with the conflict in Syria effectively over, Tehran can now focus more on Yemen. Iran has been accused of \u2018stepping up arms supplies and other support<\/a>\u2019 to its Houthi allies.<\/p>\n

The Houthi rebels have their own grievances. The group, which emerged in the early 1990s as a theological movement that preached peace and tolerance, is linked to the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam. Zaydi imams ruled the northern province of Saada, the Houthis\u2019 stronghold, for 1,000 years until Yemen\u2019s 1962 military coup. The coup precipitated the first Yemenite civil war between the north and south.<\/p>\n

Saleh participated in the coup, then showed great political acumen in climbing North Yemen\u2019s military and political ladder. He became president of North Yemen in 1978 (North Yemen united with South Yemen in 1990 to form the current Republic of Yemen) after the assassination of President Ahmad al-Ghashmi.<\/p>\n

Saleh saw the Houthis as a threat to his rule. In 2004, he sent troops to Saada to arrest the group\u2019s founder, Hussein Bader Addian al-Houthi. Hussein was killed, sparking the insurgency that has continued ever since.<\/p>\n

The conflict escalated after the Houthis bombarded the Dar al-Hadith seminary<\/a> in Dammaj village in 2013, killing around 100 people. For the Houthis, the seminary was a Salafi proselytising entity advocating anti-Zaydism. Funded largely with Saudi money, the seminary had attracted an estimated 7,000 Salafists from across the world to study.<\/p>\n

The Houthis\u2019 latest foray into Sana\u2019a demonstrates not only that they\u2019re well organised and armed, but that they\u2019re now united under a single command. Their opponents are fragmented, drawing support from different foreign backers (as seen, for example, with the UAE-backed \u00a0al-Hirak Movement<\/a>, which is composed of nine factions, some of which want to secede from Yemen).<\/p>\n

Complicating the situation further is the presence of a melange of Salafi-jihadi groups\u2014some affiliated with Islamic State, others with al-Qaeda\u2014and indigenous groups, with differing views about how Yemen should be governed. Giorgio Cafiero points out<\/a> that Salafi-jihadi groups see Yemen as a safe haven from which they can launch attacks against Gulf Cooperation Council members and Western powers. The Trump administration has engaged in a bitter drone campaign against these entities, particularly al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). President Donald Trump authorised 40 airstrikes against AQAP inside Yemen in March 2017.<\/p>\n

With so many actors pursuing so many agendas, the opportune moment for peace negotiations remains elusive. Until Tehran and Riyadh settle their competition for supremacy in the Middle East, it\u2019s unlikely that the conflict in Yemen will end. That means that the burden of suffering will continue to fall on the shoulders of ordinary Yemenites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 4 December, Houthi rebels in Yemen killed former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. A few days earlier, Saleh had ended his three-year-old alliance with the Houthis and sought to re-establish relations with Saudi Arabia. Saleh\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":606,"featured_media":36115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1211,247,1078,542],"class_list":["post-36113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-houthis","tag-iran","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-yemen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYemen: war without end? | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/yemen-war-without-end\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yemen: war without end? | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On 4 December, Houthi rebels in Yemen killed former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. 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