Paris, and by extension Syria, is obviously the big story at the moment, but we shouldn’t forget the other brutal, destructive civil war wracking an Arab country at the moment: the one in Yemen. Forces loyal to President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, along with his coalition of Gulf supporters, entered Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city and the most important stop between Aden and Sanaa, in August, but they haven’t been able to take control and have effectively besieged it. Fighting has been bogged down throughout Taiz province for a few months at this point. Hadi’s forces appear to have stretched themselves a bit thin, and the Houthis (along with forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh) have been better able to resist their advance in Taiz than they were further to the south, and have even clawed back some of the territory they’d lost.
Also complicating things is the possibility that the pro-Hadi forces have been “infiltrated” by Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood elements, possibly some element backed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and maybe even some fighters with ties to ISIS. Egypt and the UAE, both of whom have sent ground forces in to aid Hadi, as well as Hadi’s own government, have major problems working with even the Brotherhood, let alone AQAP or ISIS. Egypt in particular has no interest in seeing Taiz, which is uncomfortably close to the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait that bottlenecks Red Sea shipping, go from Houthi control to Muslim Brotherhood control. Egypt didn’t really have a problem with the Houthis before they joined the Saudi coalition, but President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s issues with the Muslim Brotherhood are quite clear, no?
Hadi, the Egyptians, and the Emiratis also don’t want to fight alongside, and thereby potentially filter advanced weaponry to, these more radical elements. So there’s been kind of a breakdown in cohesion among the nominally pro-Hadi forces. The AQAP fighters also have a habit of summarily executing people who’ve surrendered or maybe weren’t among the Houthi forces in the first place, which makes that whole “hearts and minds” thing way harder than it might otherwise be.
Luckily, the Saudi cavalry is coming to the rescue. Their coalition sent new forces to bolster Hadi’s side and maybe crowd out the extremists, and a “new offensive” to take Taiz province has been announced. Hadi himself arrived in Aden today, for the second time, allegedly to oversee the new operation, a day after fighting around Taiz city killed around 50 people, including 8 civilians, and saw Hadi’s forces make some advances. Which I guess means that the Saudi-Hadi side has opted not to use the brief stalemate in the fighting to pursue a peaceful settlement to the civil war? And that’s a shame, because, holy hell, the Yemeni people need this war to end:
The situation in Taiz city is devastating. It’s a large city of 600,000 people with a frontline running down the middle. There is active fighting and daily airstrikes. The sense of fear is big. People are terrified that their children will get wounded or killed. And they have good reason to be frightened.
A few weeks ago a father was playing soccer with his three children when a shell fell. They weren’t brought to hospital—there was no point as all four were dead within seconds.
A lot of airstrikes happen at night. Lying in your bed, you hear the planes circling above the city, then you hear the whistle of a bomb falling, and then you brace yourself for the impact. You hope it’s not your building that it’s going to hit. And then it hits another building, not your house, so as well as being frightened, you’re also relieved.
The noise of the airstrikes is so loud and intense that you can actually feel it in your bones. This is what people have been going through every night, for months on end.
I’ll put up this link to charities doing work in Yemen again, and please give if you can, but the sad fact is that no amount of humanitarian aid is going to help (or even make it to the people who need it) unless and until the fighting stops. And as of today, not only is the fighting not going to stop, it appears that it’s going to get worse.
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