Yemen crisis: Explained

The origins

• The roots of the Houthi movement can be traced to “Believing Youth” (Muntada al-Shahabal-Mu’min), a Zaydi revivalist group founded by Hussein al-Houthi and his father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, in the early 1990s.
• Badr al-Din was an influential Zaydi cleric in northern Yemen.
• Inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the 1980s, Badr al-Din and his sons started building vast social and religious networks among the Zaydis of Yemen, who make up roughly one-third of the Sunni-majority country population.

• When Badr al-Din al-Houthi and his son Hussein launched Believing Youth, the plan was to reorganise the Zaydi minority.
• But when the movement turned political and started attacking the “corrupt” regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh and his support for the U.S.’s war on terror, it became a thorn on Saleh’s side.
• They called themselves Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), mobilised tribesmen in the north against the government and chanted the “Death to America” slogans.
• In 2004, Saleh’s government issued an arrest warrant against Hussein al-Houthi. He resisted the arrest, starting an insurgency.
• In September 2004, the government troops attacked the rebels and killed Hussein. Since then, the government launched multiple military campaigns in Sa’dah, the Zaydi stronghold, to end the resistance, which was locally called the Houthis movement, after their “martyred” leader. But the government’s heavy hand backfired.
• It only strengthened the Houthis, who, by 2010 when a ceasefire was reached, had captured Sa’dah from the government troops.

2011 Arab Spring

• When protests broke out in Yemen in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring protests, the Houthis backed the agitation.
• President Saleh, a Zaydi who was in power for 33 years, resigned in November, handing the reins to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Saudi-backed Sunni.
• Yemen, under the tutelage of the Saudis and the Emiratis, started a national dialogue to resolve internal differences.
• The Houthis were part of the dialogue. But they fell out with the transition government of Mr Hadi, claiming that the proposed federal solution, which sought to divide the Zaydi-dominated north into two land-locked provinces, was intended to weaken the movement. They soon got back to the insurgency.
• Saleh, who was sidelined by the interim government and its backers, joined hands with his former rivals and launched a joint military operation.
• By January 2015, the Houthi-Saleh alliance had captured Sana’a and much of northern Yemen, including the vital Red Sea coast. (Later the Houthis turned against Saleh and the latter was killed in December 2017).
• The Houthis and security forces loyal to Saleh - who was thought to have backed his erstwhile enemies in a bid to regain power - then attempted to take control of the entire country, forcing Mr Hadi to flee abroad in March 2015.
• The rapid rise of the Houthis in Yemen set off alarm bells in Riyadh which saw them as Iranian proxies.
• Saudi Arabia, under the new, young Defence Minister, Mohammed Bin Salman, started a military campaign in March 2015, hoping for a quick victory against the Houthis.
• Alarmed by the rise of a group they believed to be backed militarily by regional Shia power Iran, Saudi Arabia and eight other mostly Sunni Arab states began an air campaign aimed at defeating the Houthis, ending Iranian influence in Yemen and restoring Mr Hadi's government. The coalition received logistical and intelligence support from the US, UK and France.
• At the start of the war Saudi officials forecast that it would last only a few weeks. But four years of military stalemate have followed.
• Coalition ground troops landed in the southern port city of Aden in August 2015 and helped drive the Houthis and their allies out of much of the south over the next few months.
• Mr Hadi's government has established a temporary home in Aden, but it struggles to provide basic services and security and the president continues to be based in Saudi Arabia.
• The Houthis meanwhile have not been dislodged from Sanaa and north-western Yemen. They have been able to maintain a siege of the third city of Taiz and to launch regular ballistic missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia.
• In September 2019, Saudi Arabia's eastern oil fields of Abqaiq and Khurais were attacked by air, disrupting nearly half the kingdom's oil production - representing around 5% of global oil output.
• The Houthis claimed responsibility but Saudi Arabia and the US accused Iran of carrying out the attacks.
• Militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the local affiliate of the rival Islamic State group (IS) have taken advantage of the chaos by seizing territory in the south and carrying out deadly attacks, notably in Aden.
• The launch of a ballistic missile towards Riyadh in November 2017 prompted the Saudi-led coalition to tighten its blockade of Yemen.
• It said it wanted to halt the smuggling of weapons to the rebels by Iran - an accusation Tehran denied - but the restrictions led to substantial increases in the prices of food and fuel, helping to push more people into food insecurity.
• The warring parties agreed on a ceasefire at talks in Sweden. The Stockholm agreement required them to redeploy their forces from Hudaydah, establish a prisoner exchange mechanism, and to address the situation in Taiz.
• While hundreds of prisoners have since been released, the full redeployment of forces from Hudaydah has not yet taken place, raising fears that the Stockholm agreement will collapse and that the battle for Hudaydah will resume.
• In July 2019, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key ally of Saudi Arabia in the war, facing international criticism of its conduct, announced a withdrawal of its forces from Yemen.
• In August 2019, fighting erupted in the south between Saudi-backed government forces and an ostensibly allied southern separatist movement supported by the UAE, the Southern Transitional Council (STC).
• Forces loyal to the STC, which accused Mr Hadi of mismanagement and links to Islamists, seized control of Aden and refused to allow the cabinet to return until Saudi Arabia brokered a power-sharing deal that November.
• The UN hoped the agreement would clear the way for a political settlement to end the civil war, but in January 2020 there was a sudden escalation in hostilities between the Houthis and coalition-led forces, with fighting on several front lines, missile strikes and air raids.
• In April 2020 the STC declared self-rule in Aden, breaking a peace deal signed with the internationally recognised government, saying it would govern the port city and southern provinces.
• Saudi Arabia announced a unilateral ceasefire the same month due to coronavirus pandemic but the Houthis rejected it, demanding the lifting of air and sea blockades in Sanaa and Hudaydah.

Present situation

• The Houthis have established a government in the north. The Supreme Political Council, headed by its President, Mahdi al-Mashat, is the executive branch of their rule. Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, Hussein’s brother, leads the movement. There are serious allegations against both the Saudis and the Houthis in the war.
• While the Saudi bombings caused a large number of civilian deaths, the Houthis were accused, by rights groups and governments, of preventing aid, deploying forces in densely populated areas and using excessive force against civilians and peaceful protesters.
• The conflict appears to have entered a stalemate. Yemen, often dubbed the poorest Arab country, is now divided into three parts
  1. The Houthi-controlled northern territories,
  2. The Southern Transition Council-controlled areas in the south (which has the backing of the UAE) and
  3. The rest held by the internationally recognised government of President Hadi.

• All sides are trying to maximise their interests with attempts to find a political solution reaching nowhere. In the meantime, Yemen’s suffering is mounting.

Impact on the World

• What happens in Yemen can greatly exacerbate regional tensions. It also worries the West because of the threat of attacks - such as from al-Qaeda or IS affiliates - emanating from the country as it becomes more unstable.
• The conflict is also seen as part of a regional power struggle between Shia-ruled Iran and Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia.
• Gulf Arab states - backers of President Hadi - have accused Iran of bolstering the Houthis financially and militarily, though Iran has denied this.
• Yemen is also strategically important because it sits on a strait linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, through which much of the world's oil shipments pass.

Analysis of the Yemen crisis

• Ansar Allah (now Houthi movement), which began as a Zaydi socio-religious movement, is now the country’s strongest war machine that has withstood Saudi attacks
• The roots of the Houthi movement can be traced to ‘Believing Youth’, a Zaydi revivalist group founded by Hussein al-Houthi and his father Badr al-Din in the 1990s
• In 2004, Hussein was killed by Yemeni troops, but the group he founded, called Houthis, after its leader, continued to the battle against the government.
• In 2014, three years after President Saleh resigned amid protests, the Houthis reached Sana'a, and by early 2015, they took over the city.

The USA Angle

• After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when anti-Americanism was at its peak in the Muslim world, several Islamist organisations had tried to mobilise supporters riding the public sentiments.
• For the Houthis in northern Yemen, it was a tipping point.
• What started as a religious revivalist movement aimed at restoring the fading glory of the Zaydi sect of Islam, the Houthis, under the leadership of Hussein al-Houthi, were turning political.
• When the second intifada broke out in the Palestinian territories in 2000, the Houthis staged solidarity protests. They mobilised supporters against the U.S.’s war on Afghanistan in 2001.
• After the Iraq war, they adopted a new slogan, “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam”.
• Not many had foreseen back then that this tiny group of tribesmen from the Marran Mountains of the northern province Sa’dah would grow into the most powerful rebel war machine in Yemen and, within little over a decade, capture the capital Sana’a and establish their rule over much of the country.
• For the past six years, the Houthis have been controlling Sana’a, while attempts to dislodge them, including a Saudi-led military intervention, failed to meet their goals.
• The success story of the Houthis is also the story of one of the worst humanitarian crises of our times.
• The Saudi military intervention, the Houthi resistance and a separatist movement in the south have collectively turned Yemen into a humanitarian catastrophe.
• And then, there is Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, exploiting the lawlessness and expanding its operations.
• Making matters worse, the administration of Donald Trump in the U.S. designated the Houthis a ‘terrorist organisation’ in its final days in office. This is expected to make providing aid to the Houthi-held territories and finding an eventual political solution to the crisis difficult. The ball is now in U.S. President Joe Biden’s court.