The West's forever war on Yemen
For 49 consecutive days, the US has bombed more than 1,000 sites in Yemen.
Leaks from a private Signal group discussion earlier this year reveal Trump administration war planning in the Middle East: the "plan" was to wage war on Yemen to protect Israel and western shipping in the Red Sea, and get Arab and European governments to pay for it.
“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light [to bomb Yemen], but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return,” one person identified in a group chat started by national security advisor Mike Waltz (now removed) was revealed as saying.
The person was identified by the Atlantic as SM, which appears to be Trump adviser Stephen Miller. “If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM said.
US President Donald Trump always wants others to pay for what America does, whether its Ukraine, or the Middle East - except, of course, for Israel, which has a blank cheque for endless war from Washington.
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Today the US bombing campaign against Yemen is related to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which Yemen’s Ansar Allah government opposes through attacks on Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea, and missile strikes on Israel.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was reportedly not keen on the idea proposed by Trump that US shipping could get free passage through the Suez Canal because the US is waging war to restore free navigation through the Red Sea. The view of many Egyptians is that Trump is not fighting the Houthis for Egypt - but rather for Israel.
The Houthis have made clear that only an end to the US-backed genocide will lead to an end to its naval blockade in aid of Palestine.
“The killing of innocent civilians is an abject failure for the United States. It will prolong the war and create more enemies,” Mohammed, a resident of Sanaa, told Middle East Eye this week after a strike on his neighbourhood that killed 12.
Trump's history of bombing Yemen
Trump has a history of bombing Yemen. The image of Nawar "Nora" al-Awlaki, the eight-year-old daughter of US-Yemeni citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, haunted me when the news broke that she had been killed on 29 January 2017 in a commando raid ordered by US President Donald Trump early in his first term.
The photo, showing her hands cupped under her beaming face, with a big red bow atop her head, was proof that Trump was no different than his predecessors in his callous use of military violence against Arab populations.
To be elected president of the United States is to sign up for the mass killing of foreign civilians, most of them in the Arab world. For the US political and media class, decades of dehumanisation have made such killings simply part of the business of government, whether in Palestine, Yemen, Iraq or elsewhere.
To be elected president of the United States is to sign up for the mass killing of foreign civilians, most of them in the Arab world
By all accounts young Nawar died bravely, expressing concerns about others despite her fatal injuries, on a day when 25 civilians were killed in the village, as well as 14 fighters. Her grandfather, a former government minister, denied that the village in which his granddaughter was staying was an al-Qaeda hotbed as had been claimed, but rather home to her uncles, who were fighting the Ansar Allah (Houthi) government of Yemen.
Nawar’s father was a charismatic pro-jihadist speaker killed in a strike ordered by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama in 2011. Two weeks later, in another drone strike against a US citizen, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed in what was later described as a "mistake", sparking outrage in Yemen.
Since beginning his second term, Trump has continued targeting Yemen, with an undeclared war escalating the strikes that began under President Joe Biden in late 2023. This week, at least 68 people, many of them African migrants, were killed in a strike on a detention centre in Saada, northern Yemen. Another strike earlier last month on a vital oil installation killed 74 people.
US Central Command has claimed its strikes are targeting Houthi fighters "to degrade the economic source of power of the Houthis", but many civilians have been killed and civil infrastructure destroyed.
Like Israel, which has also targeted Yemen in response to the strikes carried out by the Houthis in solidarity with Gaza, the effect of this campaign is to destroy Yemen’s fragile economy, already ravaged by a decade-long war waged by Saudi Arabia. That war was winding down since negotiations and prisoner swaps in 2022.
Western wars on Yemen
But the truth is, the West and its allies have been waging war against Yemen, in one form or another, for decades.
In November 2000, al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula attacked the USS Cole off Yemen’s coast, killing 17. In 2002, six men driving in a sedan were struck and killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a US Predator drone, including the alleged architect of the Cole attack. But it was not until the Obama administration that drone strikes on Yemen became frequent, reaching their peak under Trump.
In 2004, meanwhile, Yemen’s western-backed government launched the first of many wars against the Houthi movement in Yemen’s northern border region with Saudi Arabia. The wars continued through till 2010, while Saudi support for government forces led to Houthi incursions into Saudi Arabia.
A Saudi strike in December 2009 killed 54 people, a foreshadow of what was to come in 2015, when new defence minister Mohammed Bin Salman launched a bombing campaign in Yemen in support of its government.
In January 2018, I visited the Yemen-Omani border, and met Yemenis who were receiving medical treatment in Oman’s hospitals in Salalah. Yemenis living and working in Oman spoke of solidarity with their brethren dealing with the war in their country. "I will help my friends because here the Yemenis are one people, we help each other,” said a Yemeni trader in Salalah.
Obama enabled Saudi Arabia to launch its war against Ansar Allah following its seizure of power in 2014, itself an outcome of the fall of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was toppled in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011.
The Houthis expelled the Saudi-picked vice president of Saleh, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who remained the internationally recognised leader, despite governing from exile in Riyadh.
Ultimately, the Houthis would defeat the Saudis, and later assassinate the Machiavellian former president in December 2017. But the war rumbles on.
In the meantime the United Arab Emirates formed alliances with groups in Aden and built a statelet in what was once South Yemen, to give them control of Yemen’s strategic coast and the oil-producing region of Marib. The war and economic siege against north Yemen has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
For Obama, Yemen was a model for fighting wars without committing troops, providing weapons, logistics, transportation and cash to local proxy forces, in this case the Gulf states and their mercenary allies, including Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. The model was also deployed in Syria.
Divided country
Yemen’s politics are not straightforward. The country has been divided by history, religion and colonialism, with its north ruled for centuries by a Shia imamate, until a republican revolution in 1962, predecessors to the ruling Houthis today. The south was a British protectorate from the 1840s to 1967: Aden was a key port in the British empire, on the strategic sea route from India up through the Red Sea.
The mountainous north was never colonised and today stands out in the Arab world as the only political entity that is not part of the western-allied regional order. This is the core reason for the West’s forever war against Yemen.
Yemen, not the West, is obeying its international legal obligations to oppose genocide. History will not forget this
Only Yemen’s Ansar Allah, alongside Lebanon's Hezbollah, both backed by Iran, have given direct support to Palestine since Israel it launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, through missile and drone strikes. Israel’s devastating air strikes and invasion of Lebanon led to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in late 2024.
The Yemenis have remained defiant, responding to each wave of strikes by the US, Israel and the UK with mass rallies of millions in Sanaa and other cities. But the US is now seeking to destroy Yemen's capacity to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, which was the Ansar Allah's strategy to hit the economy of Israel. The Red Sea is still a critical trade route, accounting for 15 percent of global trade.
Today, Red Sea shipping is still down by 50 percent since before the Houthis began their campaign in November 2023, according to Lloyd’s List.
The outcome of this latest western military campaign is yet to be seen, but it remains the case that Yemen has never surrendered its support for Palestine, while the governments of the Arab Sunni world have stood by and left Gaza unaided during 18 months of genocide.
The western media does not mention the inconvenient fact that under international law nations are obliged to actively end cooperation with the Israeli occupation and its crimes of genocide, according to a legal opinion last year by the International Court of Justice.
In this sense, Yemen, not the West, is obeying its international legal obligations to oppose genocide.
History will not forget this.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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