Yemen Civil War To Be Protracted Conflict
The international crude oil market got a massive jolt and price rose by more than 1% per barrel to $70 a barrel within a couple of days after multiple missiles struck Saudi Aramco facilities in the Red Sea city of Jeddah last year, and drone attacks rocked the Ras Tanura (the world’s largest oil loading facility) and Rabigh refineries when the city was hosting an F1 racing event. The Jeddah-based Aramco oil distribution facilities had been targeted by the Iran-sponsored armed group Ansar Allah (Supporters of God), better known as the Houthis, multiple times before but not with much success. And the Houthis, though they follow a slightly different version of Shi’ism and live in northern Yemen, are part of the “Shi’a crescent” of Iran — an eyesore to the surrounding Sunni Gulf states. This country is strategically located on the shore of Bab al-Mandab, a strait between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden on the Arabian Sea. Along with the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab al-Mandab is one of the busiest routes for transportation of crude oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The strait being only 20 km wide made it easy to target Saudi oil tankers at this juncture in April 2018 by the Houthis. The action forced the Saudi authorities to stop using this shipping route.
The devastating Houthi missile attack took place six years after Saudi officials had assured the Obama Administration that they would end the Houthi rebellion in Yemen “within six weeks”. Saudi Arabia cobbled up a coalition of other four Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members to use their mighty military force, especially the Air Force, to wipe out the Houthis from northern Yemen. Only Oman did not join the Saudi-Led Coalition (SLC). It has its own compulsions. The US has provided the SLC with intelligence inputs along with logistical and re-fuelling supports for its fighter jets. Previously, the US had targeted terrorists affiliated to AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in Yemen.
The war in Yemen had started as a mass movement, part of the domino effect of the “Arab Spring” that began in Tunisia in the early years of the 2010s against corrupt leaders in the Middle East. In Yemen, this quickly metamorphosed into a civil war between the north Yemenis and their southern brethren, which eventually transformed into a much more complicated monster after the intervention of regional heavyweights who vied to safeguard their own economic, geopolitical and strategic interests in Yemen.
Thus, the war in Yemen is multidimensional. The various forces fuelling this conflict are the historic (since the 1st World War) animosity between the northern and southern Yemenis, the clash of interests of the Gulf countries and the effect of the Cold War in the Islamic world. And, importantly, al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) militants found safe haven in southern Yemen from where they not only carried out terrorist attacks on foreign targets, but also got embroiled in the struggle for power among the Yemeni tribes.
History Of Yemen And The Conflict
Yemenis are basically tribal people. They consider themselves as of north or south Yemeni tribes and traditionally don’t discriminate along religious lines, i.e. Shi’as or Sunnis. Though most Yemenis on both sides are Sunni, typically there was never any systematic oppression of religious minorities. However, there has been an aberration in the recent past due to the Cold War in the Islamic world between Iran-led Shi’ites and Saudi Arabia-led Sunnis.
In the early modern age, there was an independent Qasimid State of Zaydi tribe in the Greater Yemen region, which was founded by al-Mansur al-Qasim in 1597 and absorbed much of the Ottoman Yemen Eyalet (govornorate) by 1628, and was victorious in expelling the Ottomans from Yemen by 1638. Zaydis follow Shi’ism but consider Zayed Ibn Ali (the great grandson of Prophet Muhammad) the Imam to be the imam to be worshipped while Hazrat Ali (Prophet’s son-in-law) is the last imam of mainstream Shi’ism. Zayed was a descendant of Fatima, Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, from his father’s side.
After the First World War, the Imam of the Zaydis at that time became the ruler of North Yemen, who continued their rule until they were dethroned by a military coup in 1962 led by a fellow Zaydi of Hashim tribe, the largest tribe in Yemen. North Yemen was named the Republic of Yemen (ROY) and developed close relations with the West, especially with the US. The Zaydis fled to their original tribal homeland in the northwestern region. Since then, these people have been marginalised and even discriminated against resulting from tribal rivalry.
Port of Aden and its surrounding areas were of critical importance to the British for food and other essential supplies for their supply ships en route to India. As such, first they brought Aden under its control and subsequently established a protectorate in South Yemen, bringing the various ports on the southern Yemeni coastline under their command. But in 1967, the British were forced to forfeit this territory following violent insurgency resulting in the birth of a new country — People’s Republic of Yemen (PRY). Even post-independence, the southerners were suspicious of the machinations of their northern countrymen. But facing an actual shortage of resources and finding no help from the West or the wealthy Arab states, they turned to the Soviets, who gladly brought them within the Soviet umbrella during the heydays of Cold War, renaming the southern Yemeni region the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY).
With the dissolution of the USSR, PDRY’s supply of aid from them stopped. At that time, when oil was discovered in two governorates in the south, the two warring Yemens considered that their union would be mutually beneficial. And so a new country, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) was formed with political power shared between them. Army General Abdulla Saleh, head of the ROY and leader of the revolution, became the President and the President of PDRY, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, became the Vice President. But disturbances started during the 1980s when Saudi Arabia began spending huge amounts of money to spread its version of Islam, Wahhabism, in Yemen, and Hussein Badreddin founded the Houthi movement to counter these Saudi efforts as well as to oppose the government of Saleh for his pro-Western and anti-poor policies. The momentum gained after the first Gulf War when Yemen’s economy slowly started to decline and finally reached a situation when its people could not afford to buy food and find a shelter to sleep.
How The Yemen Civil War Started
A combination of factors created the situation Yemen found itself in. Yemen did not support the US-led coalition forces’ attack on Iraq. As a result, the migrant Yemeni labour in the oil-rich Gulf countries, on whose remittances a large number of families survived, were found to be a nuisance by their employers. The international community also stopped sending aid to Yemen. Saleh and Hadi had been ruling the country for a long time. They and their cohorts did not allow their oil wealth to percolate down to the lower strata of people. They lived in luxurious villas, rode expensive cars and led ostentatious lifestyles at the expense of the commoners.
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