As the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen enters its fifth year, the country is suffering great physical and human destruction. Meanwhile, the coalition has no coherent aims and hopes are vanishing that negotiations in Hodeidah can lead to peace.
Five experts look at the fractured military campaign and explain its grave impact on Yemeni people and institutions.
A Multifaceted Conflict
Adam Baron
Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an International Security Program fellow at New America. Follow him on Twitter @adammbaron.
Four years after a Saudi-led military coalition launched Operation Storm, a military intervention targeting the Houthis—and despite the brokering of an agreement in Stockholm in late 2018 between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi—the conflict continues to rage. The coalition managed to push back the Houthis, while the internationally recognized government has at least largely returned to the declared temporary capital of Aden. That being said, the Houthis appear far from defeated: the group retains control over Sanaa, the port of Hodeidah, and the bulk of the west of the country.
While much of the coverage of the ongoing war in Yemen puts its start date at March 26, 2015, the reality and wider context of the conflict defies such simplistic framings. In many regards, the current situation represents a confluence of longstanding socio-political fissures loosened by the decline of oil and gas revenues and the hollowing out formal and informal institutions. These fissures were brought to the fore by the 2011 uprising, ineffectively smoothed over during Yemen’s post-Arab Spring transition, and torn asunder as the conflict escalated with the Houthis’ takeover of Sanaa and the Saudi-led coalition’s eventual direct entry into wider theater of Yemen’s war.
It is a multifaceted conflict, or perhaps more accurately, collection of interconnected conflicts. And while higher level issues—whether the internationalization of the conflict or ongoing efforts to broker a peace deal between representatives of the Yemeni government and the Houthis—continue to garner the most attention, on the ground, a slew of local dynamics often seem to have a life of their own. That is not to say that they are wholly distinct: power politics, patronage networks, and partnerships mean that national and international politics seep into things even on the most micro of levels. Still, the days of Sanaa-centric governance seem over, with a collection of power centers emerging across the country.
What does this mean for conflict resolution? In a sense, the discourse over differing start dates for the war is telling. Yemenis do not just have different opinions on the conflict, but often radically different conceptions of—and means of conceiving—what the conflict is. Policy makers ignore the complexity at their own peril.
From Reclaiming Legitimacy to Weakening It
Ammar al-Ashwal
Ammar al-Ashwal, a Yemeni researcher and an MA candidate in media studies at the Lebanese University in Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @lshwal.
The Saudi-led coalition is weakening the recognized Yemeni government by bombing the civilian population. Every time an airstrike hits a market, school, or house, that hurts the recognized government’s position and boosts the Houthis, who are able to recruit fighters as a reaction to the targeting of civilians.
Even as the internationally recognized government continues to operate in exile, the UAE—which is the second-most prominent member of the Arab coalition—has established a political body to exercise its authority on the ground, namely the Southern Transitional Council (STC). Inaugurated on April 4, 2017, the STC has the upper hand in southern Yemen, and its objectives are completely contradictory to those of the recognized government, most glaringly the former’s demand that the 1990 reunification of Yemen be abolished to create an independent south.
With direct support from the UAE, several paramilitary organizations were also created in the regions liberated from the Houthis, and all operate independently from the government’s ministries of defense and interior. For instance, paramilitary groups patrol the provinces of Aden, Abyan, Shabwa, and Hadramout, and other groups are active elsewhere in the country, such as the Giants Brigade in Saada, the Tihamah Resistance in Hodeidah, and the Republican Guard.
The Arab coalition also backs religious groups to the detriment of the recognized government. Instead of supporting the Ministry of Defense as a Yemeni military institution, Saudi Arabia bankrolls the military wing of the Islah Party (the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), which now has a virtual statelet in Marib province and widespread influence in the city of Taiz. The UAE backs the Salafi groups headed by Abu al-Abbas, while Qatar—although it broke ranks with the Arab coalition due to the Gulf crisis—continues to pump funds to the non-military wing of Islah.
All of these political and military developments have handicapped the recognized government instead of restoring its place. The inability to give Yemeni government employees their paychecks for over two years since moving the Central Bank from Sanaa to Aden on September 18, 2016 has made the government look impotent and ineffective to the average Yemeni.
This has triggered frustrated responses from government officials, most prominently Deputy Prime Minister for the Civil Service Abdul-Aziz Jabari, who tendered his resignation on March 19 in protest. Jabari called for a “correction of the relationship with the coalition” as well as “treating Yemen with respect as a country with a civilization, not a ‘banana republic.’” Minister of State Salah al-Sayyadi followed suit, justifying his resignation by claiming that “President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has not been able to return to any part of the liberated areas in his country, nor the temporary capital in Aden, which has weakened legitimate institutions and undermined their role in favor of militia groups and organizations outside the government framework.” Then on March 10, Governor of Mahwit Saleh Samei lashed out at the UAE’s role in Yemen, demanding that President Hadi “end the coalition with Abu Dhabi,” saying the UAE was “reckless” and “behaving idiotically.”
Even though the government has the legitimacy of international recognition, the actions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have weakened the government. This could prolong the war and worsen its human toll, which will complicate the peace process.
This article was translated from Arabic.
Saudi Arabia Does Not Know What it Wants
Neil Partrick
Neil Partrick, the editor and lead contributor to Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy: Conflict and Cooperation (IB Tauris, second edition, April 2018). Follow him on Twitter @neilpartrick.
Saudi Arabia no longer knows what it wants in Yemen. The current, four-year-long war was launched to roll back the Houthis to their northern Yemeni heartlands and to see a cooperative Yemeni leadership (broadly speaking) reinstated in Sanaa. However, the Saudis, with UAE involvement, are stuck in a destructive and politically counterproductive routine of air strikes—coupled with the more traditional Saudi policy of deploying cash to try to win friends, but with only mixed success in influencing people. The Saudis would probably do better to focus solely on their established, if admittedly clumsy, use of riyals and state Wahhabism in a bid to turn the clock back in Yemen to when tribes and those susceptible to Salafism were cooperative to a degree. Instead, they are blindly sticking to a failed air war that encourages Houthi missile strikes deep into Saudi territory.
The Saudis’ strategic fear in 2015 was that the Houthis’ advance inside Yemen was benefiting Iran. This has become an acute reality: Iran has greatly deepened its assistance to a Houthi force that has become deeply entrenched in running key northern territory, including Sanaa. The Emiratis, with whom the Saudis ostensibly have an alliance in Yemen that is marked more by what they do not want than by what they jointly do, are evidently planning for the completion of the Yemeni state’s collapse.
The UAE overtly backs southern secessionists and opposes their enemy, the Saudi-backed nominal Yemeni president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. In March 2019, two of his senior officials attacked the UAE’s pursuit of a southern Yemeni state (or several southern statelets); Hadi himself has attacked the UAE for behaving like an “occupier” for building up pro-Emirati, pro-secessionist forces and taking over the island of Socotra. The Saudis’ Yemeni allies include Salafis, whom the Emiratis ostensibly spurn but who are well represented among their southern allies, and the Yemeni, tribalized version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islah, which the UAE cannot countenance. Islah and its key ally, the Saudi-backed Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Hadi’s deputy, might yet decide to take on southern secessionists in an echo of the Yemeni civil war of 1994, thereby pitting Saudi allies against Emirati ones, as seen in January 2018 when they fought each other for control of Aden airport.
In Mahra, the easternmost province, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seeking to weaken Omani influence and its alleged arms facilitation to the Houthis by backing disparate local elements. In the Saudi case, this has included resuming its ill-judged attempts elsewhere to promote proto-Wahhabi ideological fervor, something that so spectacularly backfired over a decade ago in the Houthi heartland of Saada. For well over a year, Saudis have been seeking to control the Mahra-Oman border and the province’s airport and seaport facilities, while the UAE has focused on trying to include this very distinct and relatively Oman-friendly province in its southern Yemeni secessionist plans. The Saudis might be happy at any developments that emphasize the incoherence of the Yemeni state, motivated perhaps by a grand design to secure land corridors to the Arabian Sea. But Yemen’s proven inability to run a coherent, centralized state would probably enable a de facto Saudi land grab or vassal statelet in the south, whether the Saudis continue to wage war on Yemen or not.
The first phase of a peace agreement in Hodeidah, poorly observed by Houthi and Emirati-backed forces, has little to do with strategic Saudi or Emirati political (mis)calculations in the Yemeni conflict, and much more to do with these two countries’ attempted public relations in response to discomfited western allies.
The Saudis’ incoherence over Yemen relates in part to the established Saudi tradition of being happy to accept Yemeni state weakness as the acceptable price for the kingdom’s own security. This plainly does not work any longer: Yemeni state collapse has increased Saudi national security problems, while the UAE, only indirectly affected by such issues, is stirring the strategic pot to both Saudi and Yemeni disadvantage.
The War’s Psychological Impact
Fawzia Al-Ammar
Fawzia Al-Ammar, researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies in Yemen.
Yemenis in a large swathe of the country are subjected to the horrors of war by land, sea, and air, disrupting lives to a greater degree than Yemen has the capacity to handle. The war has meant tens of thousands of people have lost loved ones, including household breadwinners. It has left its mark on the faces of Yemeni children in particular. Young men and women have plunged into despair and depression, with their academic performance suffering, or drop out of school altogether because of their families’ financial situations, war-related stress, and their inability to focus on studies. And when other sources for an honest living have dried up, young men find themselves forced by financial reality to became combatants.
A survey of 902 children aged 8-18 in public schools for displaced children in Sanaa during the 2015-2016 academic year, using the Child PTSD Symptoms Scale adjusted for the Yemeni environment by the author, showed that 79 percent (712) of these children were suffering from PTSD. The PTSD symptoms include flashbacks to traumatic events, fatigue disorder, and emotional stress, but also manifest as difficulty showing emotions of sadness or happiness. The survey subjects also complained of restless sleep, nightmares, feelings of frustration, poor concentration, declining grades, fear, and avoiding places or objects likely to trigger flashbacks.
A 2018 study published by the Family Counseling and Development Foundation, a Yemeni NGO, examined people over 16 years old from across Yemen, with Sanaa overrepresented with 59.2 percent of the survey participants. The results showed that participants were suffering from anxiety disorder (3.25 percent), depression (2.3 percent), and PTSD (0.7 percent). Overall, 19.5 percent of survey participants had any kind of psychological disorder, suggesting that around five million Yemenis do as well. Yemeni women suffer disproportionately—according to the survey, women make up 81 percent of Yemenis with psychological issues.
While organizations such as the Family Counseling and Development Foundation offer some psychological counseling services, as the war goes into its fourth year, the pressure on them is escalating. Health services are in tatters, and conditions are only worsening for those suffering from psychological trauma. Psychological services are few and far between—only 44 psychiatrists practice across only four psychiatric hospitals in Yemen, all in the major cities of Sanaa, Aden, Taiz, and Hodeidah—giving a hint of the level of human suffering in Yemen.
This article was translated from Arabic.
The Weak Suffer What They Must
Afrah Nasser
Afrah Nasser, an independent Yemeni journalist, editor in chief of the Sanaa Review, and the recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2017 International Press Freedom Award. Follow her on Twitter @Afrahnasser.
Already the poorest Arab state, Yemen has been facing nothing but more destruction and starvation since the Saudi-led coalition’s military intervention began in 2015 following the takeover of Sanaa by the Houthi-Saleh alliance in 2014. Between Saudi Arabia’s disastrous strategies, the UAE’s divergent hidden agenda, and Houthis’ aggression, civilians in Yemen are paying the heaviest price of an unwinnable war. The fact that Houthis are neither outsiders nor easy to identify, as well as the rough nature of Yemen’s geography make this war impossible for either side to win militarily.
After about four years of world leaders’ apathy over the atrocities in Yemen, at the end of 2018 the international community truly pressured the warring parties to come and sit at the table for the first peace talks in two years. The tragic killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi represented a tipping point in the drive toward peace talks. The result was a moment of hope that there could be an end in sight to the war. As the weeks passed however, it became clear that the talks were a result of international will but not necessarily a local or a regional one. Hope slowly vanished. It might take another major event with an international echo to bring that hope back.
Contemplating the fourth year of the war in Yemen and the question of what has been achieved so far, I am at a loss in finding anything but further fragmentation and destruction of an already enfeebled state of Yemen. The Saudi attempt to restore the presidency of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has only increased the possibility of a permanent division of Yemen.
Saudi Arabia’s fight against the Houthis has also involved the unnecessary bombing of historical sites across Yemen. And the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s partner, now occupies Yemen’s remote island of Socotra and controls UAE-funded militias and armed groups in south of Yemen outside the control of the Yemeni government. It is unsettling how these two rich monarchies are doing such damage to world’s poorest Arab country. Being caught between these warring parties is a hell Yemenis must deal with. Our ordeal is summed up in Thucydides’ saying: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
