By Simon Korner

A bit of background: Yemen is the only country on the Arabian Peninsula that is not a monarchy or a member of the monarchist Gulf Cooperation Council. It has a relatively high population density (concentrated in the north and west of the country), and the overwhelming majority of its population are native Yemenis rather than the semi-indentured Asian labour of the Gulf states. These facts represent an implicit challenge to the Gulf kingdoms. Yemen is also one of the poorest countries in the world, while sitting on massive oil and gas fields, as well as gold, silver, zinc, copper, cobalt and nickel, and commanding the vital Bab-el-Mandab straits across the Red Sea between Arabia and Africa, a shipping chokepoint through which 20,000 ships pass a year.

YEMEN NOW

Yemen has been at war for 8 years. Even at the height of the previous truce in mid-2022, the UN Refugee Council estimated that 23.4 million people out of a population of 30 million needed lifesaving humanitarian assistance. The war has so far killed an estimated 400,000 people (BBC News, 2/4/22). Of those killed, 260,000 were children under five.

The ceasefire between the Ansarallah government – a broad coalition of the Houthi movement, who are anti-Israeli and anti-US, and other patriotic forces – and the rival Yemeni government installed by the Saudis, expired in October 2022. However, in April 2023, a new truce was signed directly between Ansarallah and the Saudis with the stated aim of establishing lasting peace. These Oman-brokered talks have been accompanied by large-scale prisoner exchanges. For Yemen’s civilians there has been a let-up since April 2022 when the first truce began, with a small increase in fuel deliveries through Hodeidah, Yemen’s main Red Sea port, through which 70% of the country’s imports passed before the Saudi and US naval blockade reduced this to 10%. For the first time in several years, there has been a resumption of flights to Sanaa, the capital, which is under Ansarallah control. But the truce up to now has been only partial, with constant violations by the Saudi side.

Despite the growing atmosphere of peace between the Saudis and Ansarallah, the war is likely to continue in the south of the country. This is because, alongside the Saudi invasion, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been fighting its own proxy war to control southern Yemen and is not part of the peace talks.

THE WAR

Yemen has been at war since 2015. The Arab Spring of 2011 and its reverberations in Yemen brought down the government of long-time president Saleh in 2012. Saleh was replaced by his vice-president Hadi, who was, like Saleh, backed by Saudi Arabia. But in 2014, Hadi was toppled by the Houthi rebels, whose stronghold is the Yemen-Saudi border region in the north of the country. The Saudi war launched in 2015 was aimed at reinstating Hadi.

Saudi and western propaganda claimed the mostly Shiite Houthis were a front for Iran and Hezbollah, and that the invasion was to protect the Yemeni people. Beyond crushing the Houthis, the Saudis wanted to counter Iran which has links to the Houthis, and seize control of Yemen’s rich energy resources and strategic geographical position. The invasion was actively supported by the US and UK, along with France and Canada, all of whom have been providing weapons and intelligence ever since. The US has provided $54.6 billion worth of military aid to Saudi Arabia and the UAE (GAO, 15/6/22). The war was supported by all the Gulf powers, except Oman, as well as Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Jordan.

The Saudis invaded the northern half of Yemen closest to their own territory, leaving the south for their UAE ally to occupy, roughly in line with the north-south division that had existed from 1967 to 1990, when northern Yemen was attached to Saudi Arabia and the socialist south allied to the USSR. These states were merged in 1994 when the president of North Yemen, Saleh, launched a war to seize the recently socialist South Yemen, whose government had fallen after the defeat of socialism in Europe and the Soviet Union. Real Yemeni unity was never achieved, and the country remains sharply divided.

What began as Houthi regional resistance to pro-Saudi rule expanded when large sections of Yemen’s army joined the rebellion against the corrupt Hadi government. Hadi’s deeply unpopular plan to divide Yemen into provinces. The plan would have entrenched geographical inequality by creating a single energy-rich province of around 1 million people, leaving the rest of Yemen impoverished. This brought more people under the Houthi banner. The war became a patriotic war against external interference, fought by a coalition of resistance known as Ansarallah, with the Shiite Houthis at its core but transcending Shia/Sunni differences and gaining further support in the oil-rich central and southern regions of Marib, Hadramawt and Shabwa, far beyond the northern Houthi heartlands.

SAUDI FAILURE

The war became unwinnable for the Saudis for a number of reasons. First, its brutal air campaign Operation Decisive Storm was not enough to defeat Ansarallah on the ground. This meant Saudi Arabia and the UAE had to send in ground troops which then got bogged down, as US troops did in Afghanistan. After 3 years of Saudi-coalition airstrikes, Ansarallah went on the counter-offensive in 2018. Its dramatic advances finally pushed the occupation forces out of the Red Sea port of Hodeidah in 2018. This victory freed Ansarallah forces to move eastwards to attack Marib, the HQ of Saudi military and intelligence in Yemen. So far, however, Ansarallah has been unable to take Marib.

A second reason for Saudi failure was the Ansarallah’s successful strikes against Aramco oil-refining facilities within Saudi territory, using low-cost drones that also hit Riyadh, Saudi airports and other infrastructure.  Ansarallah built the drones itself, which are similar to Iranian drones, and this capacity took the Saudis and Emiratis by surprise, especially the drones’ ability to penetrate the Saudis’ expensive American air defences. The Ansarallah attacks also showed the US’s unwillingness to protect their Saudi allies, despite the major ongoing US arms sales.

As the balance tipped against a Saudi victory, the Saudis were forced to oust Hadi, who’d been ruling Yemen from Saudi Arabia, and set up a new, slightly broader-based government in early 2022, in the hope of breaking the military stalemate. The Political Leadership Council, which operates out of Aden in the south, brought in some of the Yemeni groups previously unrepresented under the Hadi government. These include Islah – the Muslim Brotherhood party backed by Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia – as well as the powerful Southern Transitional Council, which is the UAE’s proxy army. In a recent twist, however, the Saudis excluded the Political Leadership Council from the latest peace talks with Ansarallah, thus side-lining their own puppet regime.

A third reason for the Saudis’ strategic failure in Yemen is that its one-time ally, the UAE, had ambitions of its own. The divisions between the two have weakened the invading coalition.

UAE ADVANCES

Despite withdrawing its troops from Yemen in 2019 following Ansarallah’s threats to the UAE’s Dubai airport, the UAE maintains a strong presence in southern Yemen via the Southern Transitional Council, through which it plans to establish a separate south Yemen under Emirati control. The major port of Aden on the south coast has the biggest container terminal in Yemen. It also houses Yemen’s biggest airport – after the Saudis severely damaged the airport in Sanaa in 2015. With Israel, the UAE has already established control over the strategically important Yemeni island of Socotra off the southern coast of Aden – an island on the sea route for ships in and out of the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandab strait.

UAE ambitions to become a major regional maritime power are clear. It has military bases in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia on the Red Sea. It has also built a new airport and military base on Perim Island, in the Bab al-Mandab strait’s narrowest corridor just 16 miles wide.

Further strengthening the UAE’s position, the Southern Transitional Council occupied the port of Balhaf, in summer 2022. Balhaf, on the south coast, is where French company Total has a major gas facility, guarded by French Foreign Legion troops who ensure that Total can siphon off Yemeni energy onto tankers waiting in the port.

Another UAE proxy militia, the crack Giants Brigades, has successfully prevented Ansarallah from taking over Marib. In doing so it defeated the Saudi-backed Islah party, which also had designs on the province and is now severely weakened.

Despite its growing military reach, the UAE is vulnerable to Ansarallah. Dubai and Abu Dhabi – important tourist and business centres – who cannot afford to face ongoing military attacks, such as the missile attack in February 2022 on the day of Israel’s president’s momentous first visit.  This has forced the UAE to accept Ansarallah as a part of Yemen’s future. In 2019, the UAE’s foreign minister said any Yemeni peace talks “must take account of the legitimate aspirations of all parts of Yemeni society. That includes the Houthis”. The UAE would settle for Ansarallah control of northern Yemen so long as the south remained under Emirati control, but it is unlikely that Ansarallah would accept such a division of the country.

REGIONAL IMPACT

Saudi credibility as the leading Gulf power has been reduced – and its war crimes, though vastly under-reported, have nevertheless damaged its reputation. By contrast, the UAE has advanced as a major player, leveraging its new closeness to Israel under the Abraham Accords – the Trump-era plan to place Israel at the centre of the Gulf states – which in turn is allowing the US to pivot away from direct rule over the Middle East so it can focus on China.

Despite this, Israel has failed to bring the UAE fully into line against Ansarallah, because the UAE fears further Ansarallah attacks. Similarly, Israel has failed to break the increasingly lucrative commercial relationship between the UAE and Iran. The Abraham Accords, which aimed at Israeli co-option of the UAE as an adjunct of Israeli regional power, remain incomplete as a result of Ansarallah’s resistance.

Saudi Arabia, for its part – having seen the US-backed forces’ failure to destroy secular Arab nationalism in Syria, and having itself failed to defeat Ansarallah – has, like the UAE, begun a diplomatic dialogue with Iran after strong pressure from China.

It was Russia’s game-changing intervention in preventing the destruction of Syria that altered the whole balance of power in the region. Syria’s survival has made possible a series of patchings-up of fractious Middle Eastern relations – between Egypt and Turkey, Egypt and Qatar, the UAE and Turkey and, most significantly, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

On a broader level, the challenge Russia has thrown down to US power in Ukraine, and the western need for energy, have given the Gulf states greater autonomy from US hegemony. These states have refused to impose sanctions on Russia, and OPEC refused to boost oil production when ordered to by the US. The Saudis have applied to join BRICS and are stepping up military cooperation with China and considering selling oil to it in yuan. Xi Jinping made a landmark trip to the kingdom in December 2022, and concluded major deals with the other Gulf countries, as well as ushering in the 2023 Iran-Saudi thaw. Only Qatar, which hosts the biggest US airbase in the Middle East, has bowed to the US’s rules and is supplying extra energy to the US and Europe.

Not that Saudi anger with the US means its ties with Israel are weakening. Major commercial links, such as the new Israeli-Saudi transnational railway joining Israel to the Gulf, are underpinned by Bahrain’s accession to the Abraham Accords. Because Bahrain is Saudi Arabia’s client state, it joining the Accords effectively allows the Saudis to achieve normalisation with Israel without doing so officially.

A DECOLONISED YEME

A decolonised Yemen would change the Middle East in several ways. First, it would weaken the Saudi ruling class, whose reckless Yemen war has cost it over $500 billion and its military reputation. It would also give Yemen control of the Red Sea and Suez sea routes, allowing it to become an important trade link between Africa and the Gulf and a possible hindrance to the free passage of ships to and from Israel. It would give Iran a secure ally in the Gulf, an ally self-sufficient in energy and weapons production. This would strengthen the alliances Iran has been building with Hezbollah, Syria and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units.

Ending UAE military influence over southern Yemen and its direct presence on Socotra island – a tall order – could establish Yemen as a hub of east-west maritime trading and diminish the UAE’s expansionist role commensurately.

A peaceful united Yemen could also boost China’s Belt and Road project. Yemen’s ten ports stretching round its southern coast on the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea on its western coast could facilitate fuel exports to China, as well as China’s links with the Horn of Africa, according to political analyst Yaseen Tamimi (TRT World, 13/12/19). Aden, the biggest of these ports, could eventually join China’s ‘string of pearls’ – ports linked by the Belt and Road Initiative across the Indian Ocean. Iran’s accession to the Belt and Road Initiative in 2021 points to this future for Yemen. As China-based Yemeni commentator Hisham Al-Khawlani puts it: “In a post-war Yemen, the BRI could be a catalyst for increasing bilateral trade and economic cooperation, as it has been for other Gulf countries” (Sanaacenter, 25/1/21). This, however, requires peace and stability.

Ansarallah’s land reform within its territory has already begun, with coffee being substituted in some places for khat, the addictive drug common in the region, and the re-establishment of Yemen’s ancient coffee industry. Wheat is also being grown using modern agricultural techniques. In summer 2022, one liberated province, Al-Jawf, began expropriating land to cultivate it, with the aim of self-sufficiency in agriculture. Such moves show how Yemen could make progress towards releasing itself from colonial poverty.

IMPERIALIST THREATS

However, this vision of a peaceful Yemen is threatened by the US, Britain and Israel. Tim Lenderking, the US envoy to Yemen, deliberately sabotaged ceasefire negotiations last year by insisting that Ansarallah water down its “maximalist demands” (US Dept of State, Telephonic Press Briefing, 5/10/22). More recently, Lenderking flew to Riyadh to ensure the new atmosphere of peace did not undermine US threats against Iran (Al Jazeerah, 12/4/23).

For Israel, peace in Yemen would challenge its occupation of Socotra island and boost Iranian power (Jerusalem Post, 9/4/23), threatening Israel’s regional hegemony. Since the US gave it a more central role in the Gulf, Israel has only become bolder and more dangerous, using its leverage as a conduit to US arms to exploit the Gulf states’ uneven development and divisions. Yemeni peace is the last thing it wants. If the US, Israel and UK have to concede peace, they will ensure the terms are least unfavourable to them.

Campaigning for British withdrawal from interference in Yemen should be our priority, as a step towards a peaceful, decolonised Yemen – including an end to all British weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A lasting peace would not only benefit the Yemeni people but would reduce the room for manoeuvre of the western warmongers.

Protest in Chicago against US involvement in the war in Yemen photo by Charles Edward Miller

Another UEA proxy militia, the crack Giants Brigades, has successfully prevented Ansarallah from taking over Marib. In doing so it defeated the Saudi-backed Islah party, which also had designs on the province and is now severely weakened.