For two and a half months now, the hotbed of war has been overflowing from the Gaza Strip into the waters of the Red Sea around the Bab el Mandeb strait, through which 14 percent of global maritime commercial traffic passes. The Ansar Allah (Warriors of Allah) movement, which controls northern Yemen and most of Yemen's Red Sea coast, attacked a number of ships registered in various countries that it rightly or wrongly estimates are carrying something to Israel. As a result, along one of the world's most critical commercial shipping routes, more than 2.000 ships changed course and took the 8.900-kilometer (5.500-mile) longer route via the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Suez Canal.
According to Bloomberg, each such route adjustment cost millions of dollars and an additional 7-10 sailing days for ships carrying containers of goods or oil or liquid gas on routes between the Pacific to the North Atlantic. The armed forces of the United States and Great Britain, with the support of Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands, have been carrying out an operation called "Prosperity guardian" since January 12.
On February 1, the US and UK launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships, submarines and aircraft at 60 targets in 16 locations, including Al-Dailami Air Base near Sana'a International Airport, the Qellen military camp east of the city of Sada in northern Yemen, to the port of Hodeida on the coast of the Red Sea, to command posts, ammunition warehouses, launch systems, weapons factories, radar systems, drones...
The Ansar Allah movement responded by attacking the US Navy ship USS "Lewis B. Puller" in the Gulf of Aden, then the American destroyer USS "Gravely", and then a British merchant ship in the Red Sea. Ansar Allah announces that their actions in the Red Sea are aimed at helping the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip against whom Israel is conducting a military operation called "Iron Swords", in which, according to estimates, around 20.000 people have lost their lives so far. Given the tragic experience of war, they can perhaps sympathize with the Palestinians more than anyone else.
The United Nations Development Program has estimated that Yemen is experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world due to the protracted war: by the beginning of 2022, the conflict in Yemen has caused more than 377.000 deaths, 60 percent of which are the result of hunger, lack of health care and unsafe water; more than 11.000 children were killed or wounded as a direct result of the fighting.
...SITUATION IN YEMEN FOR WINTER 2024: Green - Houthi; yellow – southern movement together with the UAE; red – government together with Saudi Arabia; blue – Yemeni Republican Guard together with Saleh's supporters; orange - Hadrami elite units (UAE proxy), white - Abian militants
THE SAME BOMBS, AND THE OTHER PILOTS
The Americans and British have extended the "defence of free navigation" mission in the desert - targeting 85 targets in Syria and Iraq that they believe are linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The attacks came nearly a week after an explosives-laden drone struck the secret US Tower 28 base in Jordan, near the Syrian-Iraqi border, on January 22, killing three soldiers and wounding more than 40 others. The US blamed the Islamic Resistance, that is, the umbrella group Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq, for that attack.
There have been attacks on American soldiers before that, but the attack on Tower 22, which is backed by Iran, marked the first death of American soldiers in a wave of attacks caused by the Israel-Hamas war, writes the New York Times. According to this newspaper, around 40.000 American soldiers are stationed throughout the Middle East, mostly in countries close to the US. Earlier there were more of them. In Iraq in 2007, during the war that followed the US invasion, there were about 160.000 of them. Now there are only about 2.500 American troops there, stationed at installations such as Al Asad Air Base in Iraq's western desert. Currently, about 900 US troops are stationed in Syria, where they support Kurdish forces and operate against Lebanon-based Hezbollah.
As the damage caused by US airstrikes is assessed, the ball is in Tehran's court and its decision on whether to respond or take the hit and opt for de-escalation.
Washington and its allies are betting that the Iranians will prefer the latter course, seeing no benefit in going to war with a far superior power.
Researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrey Yaslavsky reminds that the current attacks by the US and its allies are not the first in Yemen. In recent years, there have been more than 370 attacks on rebels with rockets, bombs, drones. So now nothing fundamentally new has happened. The bombs are the same, only the pilots are different.
The Ansar Allah movement, a militia with no air force or navy, has long experience in civil war and in confrontation with the Saudis since 2015 and, in fact, with the United States, which supported them, whose military intervention in Yemen proved unsuccessful. Specifically: it did not lead to peace or to the establishment of an order that would be useful for Riyadh.
Ansar Allah is clearly ready for a protracted war. "Now certainly the Houthis are not primitive Bedouins who cross the desert on camels", explains the former Russian ambassador to Yemen, Oleg Peresipkin.
A system of bunkers and tunnels has been developed. In May 2023, at the parade at the old airport in Sana'a, in addition to tanks and armored vehicles, they even showed rockets of their own production, said Arabist Semyon Bagdasarov for RIA Novosti.
HISTORICAL ROOTS
The American Bruce Riedel, an expert on Middle East politics, back in 2017 in an article for the Brookings Institute, tried to illustrate how two administrations of the United States supported Saudi Arabia in the war against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which created the worst humanitarian disaster in the world and threatens to turned into the biggest famine in recent decades without a serious campaign to explain "why Americans should see them as our enemies...".
Members of Ansar Allah are called Houthis by the media, after the dead leader Badreddin al-Houthi, and by religion they are Shiites.
Russian historian and former ambassador to Yemen Oleg Peresipkin recommends that in order to understand the circumstances, we must turn to distant history:
"Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, had a daughter, Fatima, who gave birth to two sons - Hussein and Hassan. The first died in 680 in a battle with a detachment of the Umayyad Caliphate near the Iraqi (if we use modern geographical concepts) city of Karbala. Then Hasan had a grandson Zayed, who after the defeat in the battle for the caliphate throne fled to Iran, and then to northern Yemen, where in the 10th century his supporters settled in the city of Sada..."
And the American Bruce Riddell, an expert on Middle Eastern politics, in an article for the Brookings Institute in 2017, looks back on history and recalls that the Houthis are religious followers of Zayed, who in the ninth century stopped in the mountains of northern Yemen, where they were the majority population and that in 740 Zayed led an uprising against the Umayyad Empire, which ruled from Damascus. He was killed in the rebellion, and his head is believed to be buried in a temple in Kerak, Jordan. For the next thousand years, they fought for control of Yemen, with varying degrees of success, against both the Ottomans and the Wahhabis in the 18th and 19th centuries.
YEMENI REVOLUTION 1962.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, power in North Yemen was assumed by the Mutawaklit Kingdom, internationally recognized as the legitimate government of Yemen, whose capital was in Taiz. The kingdom fought and lost a border war with Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s was increasingly caught up in political turmoil in the Middle East.
At the center of the turmoil was Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led a revolution in Egypt in 1952 and overthrew the monarchy, nationalized the Suez Canal and fought against Israel, Great Britain and France in 1956. He was a promoter of pan-Arabism, the idea that there should be a single Arab country from Morocco to Oman. In 1958, Syria united with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), and Yemen partially joined through the "United Arab States" (UAS) alliance.
In fact, Nasser sought to secure a foothold in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, take over the strategic port of Aden from the British, and rival the Saudi monarchy. However, since Syria left the UAR in 1961, the Yemeni imam Ahmed fell out with Nasser from December 1961, with whom he had previously allied against the British and Saudis.
However, Nasser maintained parallel contact with the 38-year-old heir to the throne, Mohammed el-Badr, the Imam's eldest son, who abused alcohol and drugs during his frequent visits to Europe and the United States, and was prone to alliances with Egypt, China, and the USSR. Imam of Yemen, 71-year-old Ahmed bin Yahya died on September 19, 1962 in his sleep. He was succeeded by Mohammed el-Badr, who had already concentrated in his hands the positions of prime minister, minister of interior and foreign affairs, defense and governor of Sana'a.
One of El-Badr's closest advisers was 46-year-old lieutenant colonel Abdullah e-Salal from the family of a major merchant, who received officer training in Iraq. In 1948, he took part in a failed coup and served seven years in prison, but was released in 1955 at the initiative of El-Badr, who made him head of his guard. He then appointed him the head of the military school in Sana, among whose cadets he was in 1961/1962. the organization "Free Officers" operated.
A week after 36-year-old Mohammed al-Badr ascended the throne following the death of his father, the army attacked the royal palace. On the morning of September 27, 1962, Radio Sanaa announced the overthrow of El-Badr and the creation of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR).
Already on the first day of the revolution, by the verdict of the People's Tribunal, headed by Captain Daifala, about fifty members of the ruling dynasty, governors and ministers were shot. In the central square of Sana'a, in front of the burned imam's palace, more than 70 bodies of members of the old regime remained.
photo: ap...
The garrisons of Taiz, Hodeidah, Ib, Haji and Salif declared their support for the revolution. Salal, who was promoted from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general in one day, took office in the presence of five hundred tribal sheikhs and various authorities gathered in Sana'a for the inauguration.
"The corrupt monarchy that ruled for a thousand years and was a shame for the country, the Arab world and all of humanity was overthrown. Anyone who tries to restore it is an enemy of Allah and the people," said Salal.
Radio Sana published the "Manifesto of the September 26 Revolution", which spoke about the unification of the country (Yemen, Aden and the Aden Protectorates) and the construction of a democratic Islamic republic. On the same day, the composition of the government was announced, in which there were prominent figures from both the north and Aden, who learned about their appointment from the broadcast of Radio Sana. After learning that he had become a minister during a lunch with Iraqi President Qassem, Moshin Alani, instead of returning to Yemen, first went to Cairo to talk with Nasser.
On September 28, Radio Sana reported that Imam El-Badr was killed during an attack on the palace, although he, hearing the tanks and seeing that Colonel Sali was nowhere to be found, fled to the countryside and joined the royalists in their camps in Saudi Arabia. Shiite Zaydis also fled to the mountains along the Saudi border to join the royalists, who were mostly Sunni. Saudi Arabia supported the royalists against Egypt, as did Israel, secretly.
KENNEDY, CUBA, INDIA YEMEN 1962...
In the briefings that the CIA prepared for American President John Kennedy in the fall of 1962, especially at the end of September and October, three stories dominated: Cuba (missile crisis), India (war with China over the borders of Tibet) and Yemen. A day after the coup in Yemen, the CIA reported that Badr's uncle Hassan was rallying the northern Shiite Zaydi tribes along the Saudi border to fight to restore the monarchy. One submission stated that Cairo was "delighted" by the coup and complicit in its execution; On October 2, 1962, that "a civil war is taking shape with the direct support of the UAR for one faction and Saudi Arabia for the other," and on October 6, 1962, that "the struggle in Yemen is becoming international."
On October 31, 1962, the CIA estimated that Egypt had 4.000 troops in Jordan, in March 1963 that number was increased to 30.000. The main contractor of Egypt's "Operation 9000" in Yemen was Anwar Sadat, the president of the National Assembly and Nasser's successor.
Beginning in late October 1962, Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 bombers (with Soviet crews) bombed royalist targets along the Saudi-Yemeni border. That air operation was codenamed "Mubarak" after Hosni Mubarak, who was the nominal Egyptian commander of the Tu-16 squadron. (We are talking about Sadat's successor as Egyptian president, who will be overthrown much later in 2011 by the so-called Arab Spring).
Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as the British, pressured Kennedy to support the royalists and not recognize the new government. Jordan's King Hussein pressed Washington and Riyadh to "intervene in Yemen before it is too late" and that the revolution in Saudi Arabia "could easily be ignited by an adventure in Yemen."
This put pressure on Kennedy to implement the doctrine of US President Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1957 promised to help any country threatened by communism, and in 1958 sent troops to prevent a Nasserist takeover of Lebanon.
On December 19, 1962, despite Saudi, Jordanian, and British pressure not to do so, Kennedy recognized the new government in Sana'a, just two and a half months after the Soviet Union, with which he was at the time, did so (October 1, 1962). reached a far-reaching compromise in the Cuban crisis. In that Yemeni war, the Nasserists won, and the Egyptians eased their rivalry with the Saudis and in 1967 began to withdraw their best troops from Yemen, which, according to Western chroniclers, were critically lacking in the conflict with Israel in Sinai.
"WAR IN THE POLITBURO" 1986.
Like Germany, China, Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War, Yemen was divided from 1967 to 1990 into North Yemen (Democratic Arab Republic of Yemen, capital Sana'a) and South Yemen (People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, capital port Aden), which declared independence in 1967, ending the British protectorate established in 1838 over two-thirds of the territory of today's Yemen.
The British left after guerrilla resistance by the Marxist National Liberation Front and the National Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen.
In both Yemens, conditions were Cold War complex.
Journalist John Kifner specifically for the "New York Times" on February 9, 1986 in the article "Massacre with tea: South Yemen at war" described how a twelve-day war began at a meeting of the politburo in the capital of South Yemen:
"Tea was served to the members of the Politburo from a thermos bottle by one of the president's personal guards, Ali Salem el-Bid later recalled, while the other, as always, put the leader samsonite attaché bag on the armchair. It was strange, Mr. Bid thought, that the meeting started almost on time—seven minutes past 10—though there were still empty seats. Then the shooting started.
"A security guard with a briefcase, who was called Hasan, suddenly started running a scorpion up and down Ali Antar's back as he was opening his briefcase," Mr. Bid said, describing the death of Mr. Antar, the vice president and former defense minister.
"More of them entered from the side room with AK-47s and started shooting at us," said Mr. Bid, one of the three members of the Politburo who left the meeting alive.
Thus began what both independent sources and the new Marxist leadership here described as President Ali Nasser Muhammad el-Hasani's attempted gang-style massacre of his rivals in the 15-member Politburo of the impoverished southern Arabian Peninsula nation's ruling party on the morning of January 13. . The latest in a series of coups in the chronically restive country, historically divided into hundreds of feuding tribes, led to 12 days of street fighting that tore apart much of the capital and left thousands dead.
It also drove President Hassani into exile, brought his hard-line communist opponents to power and left many open questions for this strategic part of the world, the Soviet Union's strategic stronghold in the Middle East.
Most members of the Politburo were armed and accompanied by their own bodyguards. Wild gunfire erupted, and Mr. Beade remembers ducking under a table and crawling to safety in a back reception room as the president's guards retreated from the conference room, firing volleys.
"Who would have thought that a colleague could do such a thing?" asked Salim Saleh Mohammed, another survivor of the meeting, the new secretary of the Central Committee of the Yemeni Socialist Party. 'Well, last June the Politburo adopted a resolution that anyone who resorted to violence in the settlement of internal political disputes was considered a criminal and a traitor to the fatherland...'"
Half a century later, Forbes in Russian also recalled a bizarre detail from the tragic twelve-day war that followed:
"The country was home to a large colony of Soviet people who had to be transported by sea. A warship entered the port, and the evacuees from the coast were brought to it in boats. Everything was going according to plan, but suddenly the wife of one of the employees of the trade representative office remembered that in her haste at home she forgot the leather coat she had bought with the currency she had been saving for a long time. She is hysterical and refuses to get on the ship. It's for her coat the meaning of life, without it he does not want to return to the USSR. And the poor husband has no choice but to take a white flag (made of a sheet tied to a stick) in his hands and, waving it, walk through the whole town between the warring parties to get a leather coat…”
"DANCE WITH SNAKES"
A Republican general named Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power after a series of coups in 1978 and, in his own words, "as if walking on the heads of snakes" ruled Yemen for the next 33 years as a pandemonium, a temple dedicated to all demons. He survived half a dozen different rebellions and wars, smaller or larger (see box), maintained complicated relations with Riyadh and with Washington, turned towards Iraq during the war in Kuwait in 1991. ...
Formally, the unification of the two Yemens in 1990 took place on an equal basis, but in May 1994 it still resulted in a rebellion in the south that turned into a civil war between two armies that failed to integrate into a common state.
In July 1994, the northerners managed to capture Aden, after which thousands of supporters of South Yemen, led by Vice President Beida and Prime Minister Atas, fled the country. The process of decommunization and expulsion of southerners from the army and the government apparatus began.
photo: apA LONG HISTORY OF CONFLICT: Yemen, a land of war
In 1998, a rebellion broke out in Abyan by militants from Yemen who participated in the war in Afghanistan (1979-1989) and, returning to their homeland, united with local Islamists and tribes dissatisfied with the "northern" regime led by President Saleh. During that rebellion, Al Qaeda militants attacked and damaged the American destroyer USS "Cole" in Aden in the fall of 2000, which brought the Americans closer to Saleh, although they assessed his cooperation against Al Qaeda as incomplete.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 radicalized the movement, and Saleh, with the support of the Saudis, used the army and air force to suppress the insurgency in Sada province, the home province of the Zaydis. In that campaign, in 2004, Saleh's forces killed Hussein el-Houthi, after whom the Yemeni Zaydis were named Houthis.
Bruce Riddell of the Brookings Institution writes that Houthi supporters initially fought for autonomy in northern Yemen, and when the authorities refused to meet their demands, they increased the price and demanded the re-establishment of the theocratic state abolished by the 1962 revolution. .
When government troops pushed the Houthis towards the northern border with Saudi Arabia in October/November 2009, they crossed the border and captured the Al-Jaber military base in Saudi Arabia. There they confiscated a lot of money and a considerable amount of equipment: tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery. After that, the Houthis managed to defeat the troops of the central government of Yemen and make a victorious return.
The uprising escalated into a multi-year war that continued with varying success until 2011, when, during the "Arab Spring", the Houthis captured Sada province and then established control over territory that partially coincided with the borders of the then-existing Yemen Arab Republic. from 1962 to 1990
When they captured Yemen's capital, Sana'a, in February 2012, President Saleh was overthrown. He was replaced by his former deputy, Vice President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi, a Sunni from the Saudi-influenced south.
He proposed that Yemen be organized as a kind of federation of six provinces with some autonomy. The Zayd-dominated North gained two landlocked entities. Because of this, the Houthis accused Hadi of being a Saudi puppet, and in 2014 they began to secretly reconcile and negotiate with Saleh, who owed them blood, but to whom a large part of the army remained loyal.
Under pressure from the Houthis and Saleh's forces, Hadi relinquished power and fled to the southern port city of Aden, where he gathered governors loyal to him and announced that he was still leading the country. The Houthis were going there to get him, but Hadi had already fled abroad, and his government called on the Arab monarchies to send troops to Yemen. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan and Pakistan responded to the invitation. However, in a new twist, Abdullah Saleh was killed on December 4, 2017, near the capital Sanaa, paralyzed by a week of fighting. State television called former president Ali Abdullah Saleh a "traitor leader", and on December 5, 2017, the Houthis celebrated on the streets of Sana'a.
In 2018, the ruling coalition in alliance with Saudi Arabia launched an offensive against the Houthis in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah and after six months of fierce fighting, they concluded a truce in the city, which remained under the control of the Houthis. In 2021, they also launched an unsuccessful attack on Marib, the last government stronghold in the north and the center of the oil-rich province.
And in August 2022, the French Foreign Legion entered Yemen's Shabw province, which is controlled by Saudi-led coalition forces, to guard Total's liquefied natural gas plant.
In April 2022, the UN brokered a ceasefire between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis, but six months later the ceasefire has not been renewed.
In May 2023, representatives of political parties and public organizations in the southern provinces of Yemen - which are primarily Sunni, with very few Houthis - announced the creation of an independent state within the borders of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, which existed before May 1990. They consider the project of a single state, which lasted a little more than 30 years, a failure.
FORTRESS HUTA
The Houthis (ten million people, or a third of Jordan's population) have established themselves in their native mountainous region in the west of Yemen. They position themselves as the defenders of all of Yemen, including the Sunni population. However, this did not stop them from closing Sunni mosques and firing Sunnis from leadership positions.
Some sources say that the Houthis are modeled and mentored by Hezbollah, a Shiite movement in Lebanon supported by Iran, with which the Houthis share a common enemy - Saudi Arabia and Israel. The main slogan of Ansar Allah speaks of this: "Allah is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse of the Jews, victory of Islam!"
In a 2017 article for the Brookings Institution, Bruce Riddell taught the American establishment and the public that the Zaydis are a minority of Shiites, vastly different in doctrine and beliefs from the Shiites who dominate Iran, Iraq and elsewhere, and especially that they are a very different sect from the Iranian version. the Shiites that the Americans met after the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Some call them puppets of Iran. They get help from Iran. But it is hard to say that Tehran can manage them.
It should be noted, writes Bruce Riddell, that Ansar Allah's national liberation rhetoric is met with a different response among Yemenis: the majority perceive members of that movement as national heroes.
Conflicts in Yemen
Guerrilla resistance to the British in Aden 1962–1967.
The war between royalists and Nasserists after the 1962 coup.
The conflict in Aden that started in the Politburo in 1986.
Conflict between North and South Yemen 1967–1990.
Civil War 1994.
Conflict with Eritrea on the Hanish Islands in 1995.
The rebellion of the "Afghans" and the war in Abyan 1998–2014.
Wars in Saada 2004–2014.
Civil war after the Houthis took over Sana'a in 2014 until today
War with Israel, USA and Britain 2023/2024.
