Ten years ago, in March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition launched Operation Decisive Storm, aimed at toppling a nascent Houthi rebellion in Yemen through airstrikes and blockades. Ten years later, another massive air campaign of anti-Houthi airstrikes flew over the country. This time it was the U.S. Air Force and the British Royal Air Force, aiming to end the Houthi threat to international shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the southern gates of the Red Sea.
How did the Saudi campaign fail so badly that a group of upstarts has transformed into a regional power with the capabilities to menace international shipping? While Iranian arms shipments and support certainly made the Houthi arsenal far more dangerous to the region, misplaced and misguided humanitarian aid and international diplomacy have also led to the gradual entrenchment of a fanatical Houthi regime over the past decade.
The 2012 Arab Spring revolution in Yemen brought about the abdication of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh, introducing hope and optimism for the future. Rather than reconcile ongoing political and economic tensions with separatist groups in the north and south of the country, international organizations, led by UN Special Envoy Jamal Benomar, sponsored a National Dialogue Conference which produced optimistic resolutions and dreams rather than encouraging the Yemeni government to accept responsibility for a broken political system and propose actionable solutions.
Most shortsighted of all the resolutions was a proposal to divide Yemen’s northern territory into three weakened districts, in the hopes of diluting the unified northern opposition movements. Ironically, Yemen’s transitional government and Benomar promoted the divided districts proposal even as those same northern opposition groups were staging a military campaign of territorial conquest. In September 2014, less than nine months after the end of the UN-led National Dialogue Conference, Houthi militias overran the capital city of Sana’a, sending Yemen’s sitting government into exile.
At the behest of the deposed, but internationally recognized Yemeni government in exile, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates formed an international coalition that would carry out more than 25,000 air strikes against Houthi targets between March 2015, the beginning of the campaign, and the end of the military offensive in 2022.
As every military strategist knows well, a war cannot be won from the air. A coalition of ground forces, which included among its prominent figureheads Tariq Saleh, the nephew of Yemen’s deposed president, pushed back Houthi militias, which had already reached the outskirts of the southern port city of Aden and the oil-rich eastern city of Marib in March 2015. While Yemen’s mountainous terrain proved a significant obstacle to ground forces supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it was UN-brokered peace talks and international pressure to avoid civilian casualties that ultimately brought the anti-Houthi offensive to a halt.
International attention in 2016 was focused not on Houthi atrocities, but rather on what many international NGOs termed the “worst man-made humanitarian crisis.” Photos of starving Yemeni children were used as advertisements for fundraising campaigns run by organizations like Mercy Corps and Oxfam, the latter of which spent a third of its revenue on non-program costs like administration and marketing in 2019.
The Houthi movement, meanwhile, benefited from this international attention, which afforded their leadership a degree of political legitimacy that had previously evaded them. Sitting at the negotiating table on equal footing with the internationally recognized Yemeni government did far more for their organization than military victories alone. In fact, in July 2016, the Houthi movement officially announced the formation of a political council to govern northern Yemen.
Funding for the Houthi movement was derived, in part, from the international humanitarian aid model, which had become one of the largest single components of Yemen’s gross domestic product. Transit fees charged by Houthi militias, in addition to the local patronage earned by Houthi control over the humanitarian aid delivery network, continued to enrich the movement’s leadership. Meanwhile, Yemeni farmers and local suppliers suffered the most, as they were drawn into a worsening cycle of poverty, unable to compete with food aid supplied by international NGOs and UN-affiliated organizations.
After the UN diplomatic track dragged on for two years without producing any significant results, in September 2018, the coalition launched a renewed ground offensive against the Houthi-held port on Hodeidah, which was the entry point for 80 percent of the humanitarian aid and a main source of Houthi financing. As Saudi-UAE coalition forces appeared to be on the verge of victory in Hodeidah, UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths intervened, pressuring both sides to reenter negotiations that would eventually produce the ill-fated Stockholm Agreement in December 2018. The limited ceasefire and troop withdrawal around Hodeidah failed to materialize, as fighting continued on numerous fronts over the next three years. Only the Houthis emerged victorious from Stockholm, having achieved a further level of diplomatic normalization, further cementing their presence in Yemen.
The newly empowered Houthi movement launched a major offensive in February 2021, targeting the city of Marib, where the internationally recognized government was still in power. Saudi and Emirati air strikes against Houthi forward positions were condemned by the incoming Biden administration, which announced the official end of the U.S. support for the Saudi coalition. President Biden revoked the Houthi movement’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation, pressuring the warring parties once again to the negotiating table. Saudi and Emirati-backed troops were forced to withdraw from three fronts in Hodeidah, Marib, and the central city of Taiz, with their positions quickly overrun by Houthi militias.
Renewed rounds of UN-brokered peace talks following local Houthi victories produced few results. Increased pressure was, instead, placed on Saudi Arabia to end its military operations in Yemen and enter into a March 2023 agreement with its main regional rival Iran, with an aim to bring about a peaceful end to the Yemeni civil war.
Before negotiations over the political future of Yemen could begin, Hamas terrorists launched a devastating attack against Israel on October 7, upending regional plans for reconciliation in Yemen. Houthi officials announced their official entry into the war on October 31, 2023, calling into action their political slogan: “Death to America! Death to Israel!” The Houthi movement was able to couple its international normalization from earlier rounds of UN-brokered peace talks with the legitimacy bestowed upon its military leadership by a deeply anti-American and anti-Israel constituency in Yemen.
Since October 2023, the Houthi militias have targeted Red Sea shipping lanes, upended global commerce, and launched ballistic missiles at Israel with impunity. Over ten years, the Houthis have grown into an organization financed indirectly by humanitarian aid, aided militarily by UN-brokered ceasefires, and politically normalized by diplomatic overtures that handed the tyrannical regime an equal seat at the negotiating table. The international community is responsible for having fostered the growth of this cancerous menace. It is now responsible for overseeing its removal from power, freeing the Yemeni people who have been held hostage by the Houthis since September 2014. This new round of airstrikes, coupled with coordinated ground offensives by the existing anti-Houthi militias, stands a chance of finally bringing down their regime. That is, as long as the UN does not declare another ceasefire.
Asher Orkaby is a research associate and instructor at Harvard University. He was previously an associate research scholar at Princeton University’s Transregional Institute and a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He is the author of Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Yemen: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP, 2021).
Image: Mohammed al-Wafi / Shutterstock.com.
