In the last six days of August the Yemeni rial entered one of its steepest and most rapid declines in value since the conflict began, resulting in sudden price spikes for basic foodstuffs. Given Yemen’s overwhelming dependence on imports to feed the population, such changes in the rial’s value have direct implications for the country’s humanitarian crisis.
At the end of July the Yemen conflict seemed poised to take on much broader regional and global dimensions, as Saudi Arabia halted oil shipments through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait off Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Iran declared the sea “no longer secure,” and Israel threatened military intervention if Houthi forces attempted to close the strait to shipping (see ‘Riyadh Halts Bab Al-Mandeb Oil Shipments After Houthi Attacks’).
Earlier in July, the Saudi-led military coalition and associated ground forces had temporarily halted their campaign to dislodge Houthi fighters from Hudaydah city and capture Yemen’s busiest port. The United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths spent the rest of the month shuttling between the various stakeholders in the conflict in a flurry of diplomatic efforts to stop the campaign from resuming. European diplomats also stepped up their efforts to intervene in the Yemen conflict through July (see ‘European Diplomats Expand Outreach to Houthi Leaders’).
By the end of the month, the positions of the warring sides appeared to be irreconcilable: Houthi leaders continued to insist that their forces would remain in the Red Sea city, though they had agreed to hand control of the port to the UN; the coalition and the internationally recognized Yemeni government, however, maintained their demand that Houthi forces unconditionally withdraw from Hudaydah city and governorate. In early August, Griffiths then told the UN Security Council (UNSC) that the situation in Hudaydah could only be addressed through a broader, comprehensive peace deal and announced plans for UN-led consultations between the main warring parties to begin on September 6 in Geneva, Switzerland (see ‘UN Special Envoy’s Shuttle Diplomacy’).
The Hudaydah campaign’s wider ramifications became evident last month (see ‘Offensive Displaces More Than 300,000, Red Sea Imports Drop’ and ‘Attacks Against Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure’), while relief agencies readied themselves for the campaign against the city to restart (see ‘UN Prepares for Imminent Siege, Boosts Medical Supplies’). Meanwhile, international opposition to the coalition’s actions continued to build (see ‘US Democrats Pressure Coalition on Hudaydah’, ‘Congress Debates Bill Placing Conditionality on US Refueling of Coalition Aircraft’ and ‘French Parliamentarians, Civil Society Raise Pressure Over Arms Sales’).
Elsewhere in Hudaydah governorate military actions continued in July, among them the coalition’s advance on the Houthi-held town of Zabid, a UN World Heritage Site (see ‘Fighting Continues in Hudaydah Governorate’). Houthi forces in turn claim to have deployed hitherto unseen military drone capacities against Yemeni government forces and the coalition (see ‘Houthi Forces Deploy New UAVs’).
In southern Yemen, there was a wave of assassinations against high-level security officials in Aden, the Yemeni government faced continued opposition to its political and military authority – particularly from the secessionist Southern Transitional Council – and there were protests over the coalition’s presence in al-Mahra governorate. Also in Aden, scores of detainees were released from detention facilities run by Emirati-backed local forces.
In economic developments, the Aden-based Central Bank of Yemen approved an official exchange rate with which to support the import of basic commodities, the Yemeni rial experienced steep depreciation, and oil exports from Shabwah governorate restarted.
Also last month, the UNSC discussed the UN Secretary-General’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report. As with last year, every major belligerent party to the Yemen conflict was cited for grievous violations against the rights of children. And for a second last year, the document included an annex for those parties that had taken step to try and address their violations against children. The Saudi-led military coalition and the Yemeni Armed Forces were listed in this special annex.
The United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths continued his shuttle diplomacy throughout July, visiting the main stakeholders in the Yemen conflict in an attempt to avert a battle for the Houthi-held Red Sea city of Hudaydah. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is supporting and commanding local ground forces in a campaign to take the city, announced a “pause” in the assault on July 1, stating that the move was to give Griffiths a window opportunity to pursue negotiations.
UN agencies and member states, humanitarian organizations and many other observers consider the continued functioning of the ports of Hudaydah and nearby Saleef – through which most of Yemen’s commercial and humanitarian goods enter the country – as crucial to preventing the country from descending into mass famine. To this effect an independent group of 22 of the most prominent Yemeni experts in various socio-economic fields issued a joint letter warning of “catastrophic” consequences if the military conflict in Hudaydah continues to escalate. This group – known as Yemen’s Development Champions – included former ministers of oil and minerals, transportation, trade and industry, agriculture, civil service, and tourism, as well as leading economists, bankers, businessmen and academics. They called on all belligerent parties to de-escalate the situation around Hudaydah, cooperate with the UN Special Envoy, and specifically for the European Union to step up support for the Special Envoy’s efforts.
At the beginning of July, Griffiths undertook a three-day visit to Sana’a. While in the Yemeni capital the Special Envoy met with Houthi representatives – including Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi – and officials from the General People’s Congress (GPC) party. The meeting with GPC officials was notable given that other foreign diplomats have recently experienced Houthi-imposed obstructions to meeting GPC leaders in Sana’a. Griffiths also met with the leadership and the board of the Sana’a-based Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) to discuss the reunification of the central bank, which is currently split between different leaderships operating out of Sana’a, Aden and Marib. In a July 4 press statement given at Sana’a International Airport, the Special Envoy described the talks he’d had as “positive and constructive,” and said that those he had met with had discussed “concrete ideas for achieving peace.”
The following day, Griffiths briefed the UN Security Council (UNSC) via video-teleconference in a closed-door consultation. This was the only meeting on the situation in Yemen at the UNSC in July. Also joining the briefing was the operations director of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), John Ging. Following the briefing, council president for July, Swedish Ambassador Olof Skoog, delivered the UNSC’s press statement. He reiterated the council’s call for the ports of Hudaydah and Saleef to “be kept open and operating safely” given the humanitarian situation, reaffirmed the council’s support for the Special Envoy’s peace efforts, and called on the warring parties to work with him.
On July 8, Griffiths announced via Twitter that he had held constructive meetings with Saudi officials in Jeddah. Griffiths said his Saudi hosts had expressed support for his efforts and “the prospects for resuming intra-Yemeni negotiations to reach a political settlement for the conflict.” On July 10, the Special Envoy travelled to Aden where he met with Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
On July 17, various Yemeni parties voiced their positions publicly. Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi said his movement was willing to hand Hudaydah port over to UN supervision, on the condition that the Saudi-led military coalition halt its offensive. The same day, Yemen’s foreign minister Khaled al-Yamani reiterated demands that the control of the port and city be delivered to the Hadi government’s interior ministry and security institutions, and that Houthi forces unconditionally withdraw from the entire Red Sea coast.
Griffiths met with United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss negotiations regarding Hudaydah in Washington D.C., on July 19.. In a State Department press release following the meeting, Pompeo expressed his support for the UN Special Envoy’s initiatives and his desire for all sides to come to a comprehensive political agreement. In Washington, Griffiths also met with Khaled bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the US and the brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
On July 26, the UN Special Envoy visited Sana’a again, where he met with Mahdi al-Mashat, President of the Supreme Political Council (SPC), the governing body that presides over Houthi-controlled areas. Following this, Griffiths was in Kuwait where he met the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, and Kuwaiti foreign minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid al-Sabah. The Special Envoy said afterward that Kuwait has an important role to play in resolving the Yemen conflict. Kuwait is part of the Saudi-led military coalition and is a non-permanent member of the UNSC for the 2018-19 term. The country also host the two previous rounds of UN-led peace talks regarding the Yemen conflict.
Despite this shuttle diplomacy, by the end of July, the parties to the conflict continued to be at an impasse regarding Hudaydah. Houthi officials had agreed in principle to turn over the port to UN administration; Sana’a Center sources have indicated that this was based on the understanding that customs revenues from the ports would be directed to the CBY in Aden to facilitate the payment of civil servant salaries in northern parts of Yemen. The Houthi leadership, however, insisted on maintaining control of Hudaydah city. The Saudi-led military coalition and the Yemeni government continued to insist that Houthi forces unconditionally hand over the port and withdraw from the city and governorate.
On August 2, Griffiths was in New York, where he briefed the UNSC. He shared the results of his discussions with Yemen’s warring parties on the situation in Hudaydah and on resuming peace-talks. The Special Envoy said that despite some progress on averting a battle for the city and port of Hudaydah, his office had yet to secure an arrangement between the belligerent parties for such. Griffiths said he was now convinced that the situation in Hudaydah governorate has a better chance of being addressed within the context of a comprehensive political settlement. He announced plans to invite the main warring parties for UN-led consultations scheduled for September 6 in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss the framework for negotiations and confidence-building measures.
The Special Envoy said that consultations would be inclusive and engage with women’s groups and southern stakeholders, among others. Notably, for the last two years – since the collapse of UN-mediated peace talks in Kuwait on August 6, 2016 – there have been no official negotiations between the main belligerents in the Yemen conflict.
In a July 9 letter, top Democrats urged Saudi Arabia and the UAE to drop their demand for an unconditional Houthi withdrawal from Hudaydah port and the city itself. The letter said the coalition’s “pause” in the assault on Hudaydah had created a “diplomatic opening” and the legislators called on the coalition members to allow the UN Special Envoy this opportunity to try and restart peace negotiations.
The letter noted the coalition’s stated rationale for the assault on Hudaydah – to deny the Houthis revenues from import duties and weaken them strategically to force them to the negotiating table. However, the legislators pointed to current assessments they had received suggesting an attack on Hudaydah would accomplish neither of these goals. Rather, they noted in the letter that Houthi forces required only “modest” financial means to continue fighting, that previous major coalition assaults had failed to “provide deescalation opportunities,” and that the current coalition plans to address the ramifications of the attack were inadequate to prevent severe humanitarian fallout.
The signatories were House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD); Eliot Engel (D-NY), Ranking Member, Committee on Foreign Affairs; Nita Lowey (D-NY), Ranking Member, Committee on Appropriations; Adam Schiff (D-CA), Ranking Member, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and Ted Deutch (D-FL), Ranking Member, Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.
Throughout July, military operations on the Red Sea coast continued in Hudaydah governorate, though clashes tended to be short and intense, rather than prolonged battles. On July 6, the coalition-backed Giants Brigades reported that they had taken control of most areas of al-Tuhita district, south of Hudaydah city, and had cut off a road connecting Hudaydah’s Zabid and al-Tuhita districts. Other anti-Houthi forces also continued their advance toward the town of Zabid, Hudaydah governorate’s second most-populated urban area located roughly 100 km southeast of Hudaydah city. As of the end of July, the UN had Zabid listed as a World Heritage in Danger.
Yemeni government Foreign Minister Khalid al-Yamani and UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash made statements on July 22 and 24, respectively, saying fighting for Hudaydah city would resume shortly, should the UN fail to negotiate a prompt Houthi withdrawal.
On July 27, the Saudi-led military coalition launched airstrikes on targets in the center and the north of Hudaydah city, hitting a Houthi security facility and a factory, according to reports from residents. Houthi-affiliated media outlets said a radio station building and a fishing pier were also hit. The International Rescue Committee stated a reproductive health center was also damaged in the bombings, forcing the suspension of its operations.
Between June 1 and July 24, Operation Golden Victory – the coalition-backed campaign to capture Hudaydah city – displaced more than 300,000 people in Hudaydah governorate, according to both the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and OCHA. Most people were displaced from or within Hudaydah city, followed by districts south of the city, such as al-Durayhimi. While about one third of these internally displaced people (IDPs) have stayed within Hudaydah governorate, the rest have fled, mostly to Sana’a city.
It is likely that actual displacement figures are higher, given difficulties in reaching and registering these new IDPs, a challenge reported by humanitarian agencies. Reports indicate that belligerent parties have blocked roads, impeding the work of humanitarian organizations and hampering the movement of those trying to flee frontline areas, and Houthi forces have also reportedly actively prevented civilians from fleeing. All these actions could constitute a violation of international humanitarian law.
Through June and July, the offensive on Hudaydah also caused a significant decrease in the level of imports and the number of vessels berthing at Hudaydah and Saleef ports. Notably, food imports through the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) – which helps oversee cargo shipments to Yemen’s Red Sea ports – have dropped from 409,321 metric tons (MT) in May to 287,857 MT and 235,029 MT in June and July, respectively. The number of vessels berthing at these ports dropped from 31 in May to 21 and 17 in June and July, respectively. Since December 2017, only one containerized cargo vessel has reached Hudaydah port, which happened prior to the current offensive.
As of the end of July, UN agencies were expecting and preparing for a siege of Hudaydah city, which included negotiating with Houthi authorities to allow for the large-scale distribution of essential goods. As well, seven airplanes, chartered by the World Health Organization (WHO), delivered 168 tonnes of medicines and medical supplies to Sana’a airport in mid-July. The majority of these supplies were to be transported to Hudaydah governorate.
Although the WHO reported that 91 percent of Hudaydah’s health facilities were still functioning as of early July, by July 22 the IOM was reporting that security concerns had led to a number of temporary closures. Those still running faced challenges such as staff shortages and electricity cuts, while having to shoulder increased demand for services due to a spike in casualties.
Throughout July, the offensive on Hudaydah city and hostilities in other parts of the governorate continued to impact civilians, notably in al-Tahita and Zabid districts to the south of Hudaydah city. Airstrikes hit densely populated areas, such as al-Hawak and al-Hali districts in Hudaydah city, and protected civilian infrastructure, such as a prison, water reservoirs and a warehouse containing humanitarian supplies. Between July 26 and 28, airstrikes hit and damaged Hudaydah city’s main water reservoir, located in al-Mina district, as well as a sanitation facility in Zabid district.
Airstrikes in Hudaydah governorate also caused civilian casualties. On July 10, airstrikes reportedly hit two vehicles in al-Garrahi district killing six civilians, including a child. On July 19, indiscriminate artillery shelling in Wadi al-Qawm village, al-Durayhimi district, reportedly killed five and injured three people, including children. A coalition airstrike on a school in Zabid city killed three and injured four, including a child, in early July, according to the Houthi-affiliated al-Masirah newspaper.
Credit: Ghaidaa Alrashidy
On July 23, the Senate and House Armed Services Committee released their annual defense policy bill that would place conditions on US military support for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen. Under Section 1290 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2019, for this support to continue the US Secretary of State would be required to certify the coalition’s commitment to finding a political solution to the conflict, improving humanitarian access, and reducing the risk of harm to Yemen’s civilian population.
A waiver was included for operations against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS. Of note, the UAE was named in the conference report alongside Saudi Arabia, while previous versions of the bill in the House and Senate referred to “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners.” In addition, Section 1274 of the bill would mandate a review of US actions in Yemen — both direct or via support of the Saudi-led military coalition — to determine whether such operations have violated US law or defense policy on the protection of human rights. The nature of interrogations in Yemeni prisons were specifically highlighted in the bill.
In June, the White House said it “strongly objects” to a provision that would place conditionality on support for the Saudi-led military coalition, saying the certification requirement did not acknowledge support Iran provides to Houthi forces. However, the White House did not indicate that it would seek a presidential veto over the provision. Congress passed the NDAA on August 1, with the bill now moving to the president for review, to either be vetoed or signed into law.
On June 30, the Special Envoy of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs to Yemen, Ambassador Peter Semneby, visited Sana’a and met with Mahdi al-Mashat, President of the Supreme Political Council in Sana’a. Several days later, on July 4, Antonia Calvo, Head of the EU Delegation to Yemen, was also in Sana’a where she met with al-Mashat and Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi.
On July 18, a French delegation led by the ambassador to Yemen, Christian Testot, also met with Houthi officials in Sana’a. According to a French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEFA) statement made to Le Figaro, talks centered around humanitarian issues. However, the French newspaper cited an unnamed source as saying the parties also negotiated over the release of Alain Goma, a French citizen. Goma was attempting to sail from France to India. In June, while sailing the Red Sea, he was forced to make an emergency stop in Hudaydah port, where he was subsequently detained by Houthi forces.
On July 4, the French Ministry of the Armed Forces released its annual report on arms sales. It was presented to and discussed by the parliament’s National Defense and Armed Forces Committee, which questioned Florence Parly, Minister of the Armed Forces at a hearing. Among other things, the report outlined the number and cost of licenses for arms exports that France had issued in 2017. With licenses worth more than €14.7 billion, €7.9 billion and €5.2 billion, respectively, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE ranked first, fourth and sixth in the value of their French arms export licences last year.
During the hearing, several members of parliament (MPs) raised the issue that these weapons, sold to members of the Saudi-led military coalition, might be used for military activities that violate international humanitarian law or facilitate such violations in Yemen. Answering respective questions, Parly referred to the robust and “very strict” control the executive has over French arms sales. She stressed that arms sold to Saudi Arabia in the past were solely being used for defensive purposes along the Saudi-Yemeni borders. Among other justifications, she mentioned the need to protect the 30,000 French nationals living in the region and the Emirati contribution to the fight against terrorist groups in Yemen, which posed a direct threat to France, she said.
Two weeks later, the parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee also addressed French arms sales to belligerent parties in the Yemen conflict, holding a hearing on the control of arms exports from member states of the European Union (EU). MPs of various political parties supported the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry on French arms sales to warring parties in Yemen. This had been proposed by Sébastien Nadot, MP for the ruling La République En Marche party, in a draft resolution, co-sponsored by 90 of 577 MPs as of July 18 and supported by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. During the hearing, Marielle de Sarnez, chair of the committee and MP for the centrist Mouvement Démocrate party, refused to put the draft to a vote, arguing that the necessary procedural requirements were not met. She proposed alternative, though weaker, ways to enhance parliamentary scrutiny over arms sales.
On July 8 and 9, two UK ministers resigned in protest of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit policy. This included UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who stepped down after two years in office. He was replaced by Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary. Hunt’s stance on UK foreign policy toward Yemen and the region is yet unclear, though no major changes are expected. The UK became UNSC penholder for Yemen in 2011, responsible for drafting the council products related to Yemen.
Throughout July, competition for influence in Yemen’s southern governorates came to the fore. This was in regard to both security responsibility — with the Yemeni government facing challenges specifically in Hadramawt governorate — and political control, demonstrably in the Southern Transitional Council’s (STC) renewed calls for an independent state in the south.
On July 5, the STC called on the Hadrami Elite Forces to take control of security in Saiyun, Hadramawt. The move constituted a direct challenge to the commander of the First Military Region Maj. Gen. Saleh Temes, whose forces — affiliated with Yemen’s vice president Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar — are responsibile for security in the governorate’s north. The STC cited the failure of Hadi-backed security forces in stemming a wave of murders, robberies, land seizures and other criminal activity in the Hadramawt valley, as well as the presence of northern fighters in their ranks. Saiyun is the main town in the Hadramawt valley, has an airport, and is the location of the government’s First Military Region headquarters. On July 17, STC spokesman Salem Thabet al-Awlaki said the STC rejects the presence of northern military forces in southern governorates, reportedly a reference to Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces.
In a speech on July 15, the commander of the UAE-backed Hizam al-Amni, or Security Belt forces, first brigade Brig. Gen. Munir Mahmoud al-Yaf’i, accused the Yemeni government — specifically President Hadi and Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid bin Dagher — of corruption and said they would be expelled from the south “within days.” Shortly after the speech, Hadi reportedly deployed armored vehicles around al-Masheeq Palace in Aden, where Hadi was residing in July.
On July 10, the STC staged a meeting of its National Assembly – consisting of representatives from across southern governorates – in Aden. Following this, the STC announced its objective to create a new federal state in southern Yemen, based on pre-unification borders. In a statement, the STC referred to the “remnants of northern military forces” in Hadramawt, Shabwah and Abyan governorates, calling their presence “undesirable” and advocating their replacement with southern security forces. The STC also called for the dismissal of the current Hadi administration, mentioning corruption, poor governance and the persistent economic crisis. The council announced the creation of a number of committees mandated with establishing the foundations of the new state — including the drafting of a new constitution, the construction of security bodies and defense and interior ministries, and the hosting of a “southern dialogue conference” to reach a consensus among various actors in the southern governorates. On July 19, STC President Aiderous al-Zubaidi gave an interview in which he reiterated calls for a new state.
In late June and early July, protests were reignited in the city of al-Ghaydah, al-Mahra governorate over the coalition’s imposition of military control over various points of entry into the governorate. Demonstrations originally began in April, resuming June 23 with the end of Ramadan. In what it said was an effort to curb arms smuggling to Houthi forces through the governorate, which borders Oman, the coalition had used local Yemeni proxy forces to seize control of Nashtoon port, Shahn and Sarfit border crossings, and al-Ghaydah airport in November 2017. Locals, however, said this amounted to trade restrictions on al-Mahra and demanded the entry points be returned to local control. Protests ended mid-month when the coalition agreed to return control of al-Ghaydah airport to local authorities. Saudi-backed forces then reportedly secured a key checkpoint at the entrance to al-Ghaydah city on July 17.
On June 20, Mahdi al-Mashat, of the Houthi SPC in Sana’a, wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin calling for assistance in negotiating a political settlement to the conflict.
Four days later, the Yemeni Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Mansour Baggash, met with Russia’s Ambassador to Yemen, Vladimir Dedushkin, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. According to a foreign ministry statement, the ambassador reiterated Russia’s support for the internationally recognized government and a political solution to the conflict.
Russia has made indications this year that it is interested in a role as a mediator in the conflict. In January, the Russian foreign ministry offered to broker talks between the warring parties and made a similar proposal regarding rival factions in the south.
On July 26, Saudi authorities announced that they had suspended oil shipments through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait following a Houthi attack on two Saudi oil tankers in the 20-km-wide sea corridor the previous day. In a statement, the Saudi Aramco said one of its vessels had sustained “minimal damage.” On the same day, the head of Iran’s Quds force, Qassem Soleimani, said in a speech that the Red Sea is “no longer secure” given the presence of US troops in the area.
Following the Saudi announcement, Kuwait and the UAE also considered suspending oil shipments through the strait, Saudi media reported. Adding to uncertainty around shipments out of the Persian Gulf, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on July 5 that the IRGC would be ready to close the Strait of Hormuz if the US blocked oil exports from Iran. The US State Department has said that resumed sanctions on Iran’s oil sector will come into force this November, following Washington’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
On July 31, the head of the Houthi’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, announced a unilateral cessation of military operations in the Red Sea for a period of two weeks beginning midnight August 1. Al-Houthi added that the pause, which he said was to support UN-brokered peace efforts, “could be extended and include all fronts if this move is reciprocated by the leadership of the coalition.” The Houthi defense ministry later confirmed the decision.
On August 1, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then announced that he would send military forces to intervene “if Iran will try to block the straits of Bab al-Mandeb.” Implicit in his statement was the erroneous conflation that the Houthis are Iranian proxies. This is the first time Israel has threatened to directly assert itself in the Yemen conflict.
A number of assassinations or attempted assassinations took place in July targeting high-level security figures in Aden city, as well as several religious figures:
Credit: Ghaidaa Alrashidy
On July 2, Houthi forces released a video showing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dropping explosives on UAE-backed forces 45 kilometers south of Hudaydah city. On July 5, Saudi-led military coalition forces shot down a UAV that had bombed the coalition-backed forces’ Brega base in al-Buraiqa district, Aden governorate — the first time a Houthi drone has hit targets in Aden.
On July 18, Houthi forces claimed that they attacked a Saudi Aramco oil refinery in Riyadh using a long-range drone. Aramco said that a fire at the site had been caused by an “operational incident.” On July 26, Houthi forces claimed they attacked Abu Dhabi airport using another UAV. The UAE denied this claim.
On July 18 Houthi forces claimed to have shelled a military training camp in Marib governorate, killing Brig. Gen. Mohamed Saleh al-Ahmar, Yemeni Vice President Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar’s brother-in-law and the military attaché for the Yemeni Embassy in Bahrain. The vice president was also present in the camp at the time of the alleged attack but was unharmed. Yemeni government media denied that an attack took place and said the commander was killed by a bomb explosion during an army drill.
On July 12, the Aden-based CBY approved an official exchange rate with which to provide importers with foreign currency to support the import of five key commodities – rice, wheat, sugar, milk and edible oil. The CBY had finished drafting the framework for the support mechanism in June, which will make use of US$2 billion in Saudi financial aid made available to the CBY in April this year.
A committee chaired by CBY governor Mohammad Zammam – which included representatives from the banking sector, chambers of commerce and industry, and authorized exchange institutions – agreed upon a rate of 470 Yemeni rials (YR) to the US dollar for letters of credit to guarantee payment for imports. Banking sources indicated that by surrendering its sole privilege to set the exchange rate and including private actors in the decision, the CBY in Aden is hoping the set rate will have a greater chance of being adhered too. The committee also agreed to biweekly assessment meetings to adjust the exchange rate as required.
On July 31, the CBY Board of Directors approved the first withdrawal of US$20.4 million from the US$2 billion Saudi deposit, to fund the letters of credits for the import of basic foodstuffs. On the last day of the month, the CBY also approved the second batch of bank applications to fund the letters of credits from the Saudi deposit. It should be noted that interventions in the currency market below $100 million generally do not impact the YR exchange rate.
Over the course of July, the YR lost as much as 6 percent in value, trading as low as YR 520 to the US$ in Sana’a and YR 530 in Aden at month’s end, down from YR 490 to the US$ at the end of June. As of August 5, the rial was trading at YR 550 to the US$ in both Sana’a and Aden, according to currency exchange traders interviewed by Sana’a Center economists. Also, in response to the rial’s depreciation, a number of foreign exchange traders in Aden suspended exchange transactions to avoid losses as a result of expected foreign exchange currency fluctuation. Nationwide, some traders bought hard currency at lower rates and suspended selling to the public.
Source: Central Bank of Yemen
Aden-based banking sector specialists told Sana’a Center economists that a key reason for the downward pressure on the YR was the delay in finalizing procedures for the pre-reimbursement of letters of credits (LCs), which require Saudi approval. Compounding this is the limited range of imports the LCs cover, as they exclude other foodstuffs, medication, oil derivatives, and all non-essential materials.
Between March and May 2018, the YR had stabilized, trading in the parallel exchange market at YR 480 to 485 per US$. The Sana’a Center’s economic unit found that this stabilization was due to some degree to the announced arrival of the US$2 billion Saudi deposit. To a larger degree, however, there appeared to be low demand for foreign currencies in March and April of 2018, with traders having imported and accumulated sufficient food stocks in the preceding months to meet the increased consumer demand during Ramadan (mid-May to mid-June). Lower food importation in March and April, however, meant food inventories were being depleted during this time.
In response, through May and June importers began buying foreign currency through the parallel exchange market to import foodstuffs and replenish the food stocks. In addition, there was increased demand for dollars to import clothes, oil derivatives, and other commodities to meet the higher demand for such that accompanies Eid al-Adha, the Muslim “Festival of Sacrifice” celebrated on August 21, 2018.
On August 1, Yemen’s oil and minerals ministry announced that 500,000 barrels of oil had been exported from Shabwah in southeastern Yemen — the first from the governorate since the conflict began. The shipment — reportedly worth US$35 million — left Rdhom port on July 28, according to a Sana’a Center source, and was purchased by the Chinese company Katy Petroleum. The ministry added that Shabwah would receive 20 percent of the revenue from the shipment. This is similar to the revenue sharing agreements the government has arranged with Marib and Hadramawt regarding oil sales.
Sources in the energy sector indicated that the Austrian oil company OMV resumed its operations in mid-April 2018 with a production capacity of 8,000 barrel per day (bpd), which rose to 13,000 bpd by mid-July. OMV ceased operations in 2015 with the outbreak of the conflict, prior to which it produced around 20,000 bpd.
On July 9, the council held a high-level open debate under the theme, “protecting children today prevents conflict tomorrow,” to coincide with the release of the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on Children and Armed Conflict (A/72/865–S/2018/465). For the second year running, the report includes two annex categories regarding actors that have violated the rights of children in armed conflicts around the world – the so-called “child killer list.” The “A” annex lists violators who have not put in place measures to improve the protection of children in armed conflict between January and December 2017, while the “B” category lists violators who have.
In regards to Yemen, the “A” annex lists the Houthi forces (who are referred to as Ansar Allah in the report) for recruiting child soldiers, killing and maiming children, and attacking schools and hospitals. AQAP, the associated Ansar al-Sharia group, and various anti-Houthi militias are also listed in the “A” annex based on child soldier recruitment. The report’s “B” annex names forces associated with the Yemeni government, including the Yemeni Armed Forces, for recruiting child soldiers, and the Saudi-led military coalition intervening in the Yemen conflict, as a party that “kills and maims” children.
In last year’s report, the Saudi-led military coalition was also listed in the “B” annex for attacking schools and hospitals; this year the coalition is no longer cited for this violation, despite the fact that the report documents the Saudi-led military coalition conducting 19 attacks on schools and five attacks on hospitals within the reporting period. All the above-noted actors were named in the two previous Children and Armed Conflict reports. However, in 2016, Saudi threats to withdraw hundreds of millions in UN aid funding resulted in then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon removing Saudi Arabia from the list. The creation of the “A” and “B” annex categories in last year’s report was seen as a compromise between the UN and Riyadh.
During the July 9 council debate, the Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Henrietta Fore, stated that the international community must demand zero tolerance for all violations against children in Yemen. The Yemeni government representative said the report’s descriptions of violations by his government and the Saudi-led military coalition were falsified and politically motivated. The Saudi representative also challenged the report stating that the coalition uses “maximum self-restraint” and that schools, hospitals and other civilian sites are “protected.”
In late June and early July, more than 80 detainees were released from prisons run by UAE-backed forces in Aden, notably from the Beir Ahmed prison in Aden city and the former Wadah nightclub in al-Tawwahi district, which was converted into a detention and counterterrorism facility roughly a year and a half ago.
On July 8, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash denied the UAE controlled detention facilities in Yemen. In the meantime, the Yemeni Interior Minister Ahmed al-Maysari met with Emirati officials in the UAE and Aden to negotiate the closure of UAE-controlled detention facilities and their transfer to the Yemeni judiciary’s purview.
Also on July 8, the Deputy Interior Minister Major General Ali Lakhsha visited the Wadah facility, which was aired on TV. However, the AP reported the buildings were painted and detainees were given new clothes and meals just prior to the visit. Lakhsha commented that there was no evidence of the existence of secret detention facilities outside the control of the government. Following angry reactions by relatives of the detainees, Lakhsha’s office released a statement on July 9, stating that the government was now in control of those facilities recently out of its authority. Security officials anonymously interviewed by the AP denied this.
On July 12, Amnesty International released another report, focusing on enforced disappearances, torture and other forms of ill-treatment that many of those arbitrarily arrested and detained by the UAE and aligned local forces have been subjected to. It investigated the cases of 51 detainees between March 2016 and May 2018, some of them still missing. Among various forms of torture and other ill-treatment, Amnesty mentioned cases of sexual abuse and the death of a detainee shortly after being released as a result of his being tortured. Amnesty further stressed the lack of accountability in such detention facilities and the fact that political adversaries of the Saudi-led military coalition and aligned local forces were among detainees. Amnesty demanded that such violations “be investigated as war crimes.”
The same day, the UAE government denied these allegations, calling the report “politically motivated.” It claimed that prisons in Yemen were under the control of the Yemeni government and that the UAE had urged the latter to investigate the allegations.
In early July, several journalists were detained or kidnapped by different forces across Yemen. On July 2, security forces in Aden city detained the chief editor of the local newspaper Aden Tomorrow, Fathi bin Lazraq, in the al-Mansoura area. The next day, the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate announced that Houthi forces had kidnapped journalist Abdusalam al-Daees, who was working for the Yemeni News Agency Saba in Sana’a. On July 7, unknown armed forces kidnapped the journalist Iyad al-Wasmani in Dhamar city. Fathi bin Lazraq was released after several hours, al-Wasmani after two days and Abdusalam al-Da’is in late July.
On July 3, the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate released its mid-year report, in which it documented 100 violations of press freedom during the first half of the year.
This report was prepared by Waleed Alhariri, Victoria K. Sauer, Ali Abdullah, Holly Topham, Wadhah Alawlaqi, Ghaidaa Alrashidy, Taima Al-Iriani, Maged al-Madhaji, Anthony Biswell, Farea al-Muslimi and Spencer Osberg.
Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic, humanitarian, and human rights developments on the ground.
This month’s report was developed with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
In June, the Saudi-led military coalition and associated ground forces began their long-anticipated offensive against Houthi-held Hudaydah city. The ports of Hudaydah and nearby Saleef, along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, are the entry point for the majority of the country’s commercial and humanitarian imports. This creates the potential for catastrophic humanitarian fallout from the offensive given that 8.4 million Yemenis are already on the verge of famine.
United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, spent most of June engaged in shuttle diplomacy with the belligerent parties to the conflict, and in consultations with the UN Security Council (UNSC), pushing a plan to preempt the attack by having Houthi forces turn control of Hudaydah port over to UN monitors (see ‘The UN Special Envoy’s Plan for Hudaydah Port’).
In May, Houthi forces were clearly on the defensive across most of Yemen, in particular losing ground in Hudaydah governorate as various anti-Houthi groups, backed by Emirati airpower, advanced on Hudaydah city. A Saudi-led coalition plan for a military offensive on the city last year was derailed due to a lack of US support and international outcry over the likelihood of massive humanitarian fallout. Last month, however, a Western official confirmed to the Sana’a Center that Washington and London had given the green light for the current offensive to take Hudaydah city, but with the caveat that the ports were not to be attacked (see ‘Coalition-Backed Forces Advancing on Hudaydah Port’ and ‘Anti-Houthi Forces Make Gains in Taiz’).
On May 8, United States President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement. Through the rest of the month, his administration significantly increased its bellicose rhetoric towards, and imposed punitive financial sanctions against, Tehran, often citing Iran’s supposed military support of Yemen’s Houthis as among the justifications (see ‘Washington Exits ‘Iran Deal’ and Escalates Tensions With Tehran’). Meanwhile in Europe, it became public that since February the United Kingdom, France and Germany – all co-signatories to the Iran deal – have been pursuing talks with Tehran to help end the Yemen war, with all sides reporting progress (see ‘EU Countries in Negotiations With Iran to End Yemen Conflict’).
Media reports last month revealed that US military personnel were playing a more direct and extensive role in the Yemen conflict than the Pentagon had previously admitted, while a high-level Yemeni government official also confirmed to the Sana’a Center that the US was deploying military drones in direct support of anti-Houthi ground operations (see ‘US Special Forces and Military Drones Active in Anti-Houthi Operations’). Simultaneously in Washington, lawmakers in both houses of the US Congress were pursuing legislation to increase transparency and controls on US involvement in the Yemen war (see ‘Congress Scrutinizes US Role in Yemen Conflict and Detainee Torture’).
Through the first half of May, the internationally recognized Yemeni government and Abu Dhabi traded barbs in public over the latter’s move to land troops on Socotra island and seize control of the airport and marine terminal. Yemeni Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid bin Dagher called it “an assault on Yemen’s sovereignty,” while the United Arab Emirates blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for launching a smear campaign against it. By mid-month, Saudi intervention had helped de-escalate the confrontation (see ‘UAE-Yemeni Government Standoff Over Socotra Island‘).
In the second half of May, Socotra and parts of eastern Yemen were then hit by two cyclones, with coalition partners heeding subsequent Yemeni government appeals for the rapid deployment of humanitarian aid to assist the affected populations (see ‘Two Cyclones Flood Socotra’).
In economic developments, President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s March decision to liberalize fuel imports again led to market instability as a three-day fuel crisis gripped Aden (see ‘Fuel Crisis in Aden’). Meanwhile in Sana’a, the CEOs of the country’s largest banks gathered for a meeting, organized by the Sana’a Center at the Yemen Banks Association, seeking to address the country’s financial challenges (see ‘High-Level Banking Sector Meeting in Sana’a’).
Also in Sana’a last month, the Saudi-led military coalition bombed the Presidential Office, located in a densely populated area with several schools nearby. The office was occupied by a full staff of civilian personnel at the time. At least six people were killed and 30 injured. A Senior Houthi official, in the building’s basement at the time of the strike, was unharmed (see ‘Coalition Bombs Presidential Office in Sana’a’).
In an effort to head off the resurgence of cholera with the start of Yemen’s rainy season, the World Health Organization, the UN Children’s Fund and Yemen’s national health authorities launched a mass cholera vaccination campaign last month (see ‘Cholera Vaccination Campaign’).
Also in May, high-level sources in both the Yemeni government and the Houthi leadership confirmed to the Sana’a Center that negotiations were underway for a large-scale prisoner exchange expected to take place at the end of Ramadan (see ‘Prisoner Exchange Slate for Eid’).
In May, there were no UN Security Council (UNSC) briefings or consultations on the situation in Yemen. The Government of Yemen’s Permanent Representative to the UN as well as his Emirati counterpart, however, each submitted a letter to the UNSC President regarding tensions on Yemen’s Socotra Island (see below ‘UAE-Yemeni Government Standoff Over Socotra’).
On May 8, President Donald Trump officially withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), widely known as the ‘Iran deal’. Through the deal, Washington and other world powers had agreed to ease economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for Tehran curbing its uranium enrichment program and allowing international inspections of its nuclear facilities. Trump’s move will reinstate US financial sanctions within 180 days. However, the other signatories to the agreement – the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union – have all indicated their intent to try and preserve the agreement, despite US threats to sanction foreign companies doing business with Iran.
The day following Trump’s announcement, the Yemeni government issued a statement endorsing the US withdrawal from the Iran deal. Issued by Yemen’s foreign ministry, it stated that the move was “a big step in the right direction to prevent Iran’s destabilizing and dangerous behavior,” adding that “the deal failed to protect the vital interests of not only the US but also its partners and allies in the Middle East, including Yemen.” According to a high level official within the Yemeni government who spoke with the Sana’a Center, US Secretary of State Pompeo called Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi beforehand to seek the endorsement; the latter had agreed in exchange for a US administration statement acknowledging Yemeni sovereignty over Socotra amid tensions between the Yemeni government and the United Arab Emirates over the island (see below ‘UAE-Yemeni Government Standoff Over Socotra Island’).
Speaking to CNN on May 13, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton justified the move by saying that through the deal Iran was able “to advance its interests all across the Middle East, in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen.”
On May 21, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo then delivered a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, laying out the administration’s new Iran strategy. This amounted to 12 demands to which Pompeo said Iran must comply. These ranged from ordering that Tehran “never pursue plutonium reprocessing,” end “its threatening behavior against its neighbors,” and end support for many of its allies around the Middle East. The latter included the demand that Tehran end military support for the Houthis in Yemen. While stopping short of advocating for military action, Pompeo said the US would use its full economic might to force Iran to comply, while threatening to “track down” and “crush” Iranian operatives and proxies worldwide.
Between Trump announcing his withdrawal from the Iran deal and the end of May, the US treasury also announced multiple rounds of new sanctions against Iranian entities and associated individuals.
On May 22, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed legislation that its proponents say is intended to bring the Yemen war to an end, protect civilians, and address the country’s humanitarian crisis. The bipartisan bill, introduced in April by Senators Todd Young (R-Ind), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Chris Coons (D-Del), passed by a committee vote of 14 to 7.
The legislation mandates that the US Secretary of State certify, within 30 days of the bill becoming law, that Riyadh is actively seeking to end the war, increase food, fuel and medical access for Yemenis, reduce delays for humanitarian shipments, and lower the risk of civilians being harmed. Should this certification not be made, the legislation would ban the US from providing inflight refueling to Saudi-led military coalition aircraft participating in the Yemen conflict, except in limited circumstances. While the legislation has a national security waiver attached that the White House could use to continue the refueling, such action would require the administration to explain why the certification was not made and what steps are being taken to make Riyadh comply.
To become law, the legislation needs to pass a full Senate vote, a House vote, and be signed into law by the President.
On May 24, the US House of Representatives then unanimously passed an amendment to a Department of Defense (DoD) spending bill that would require the DoD to investigate whether members of the Saudi-led military coalition have been torturing detainees in Yemen and whether US personnel were involved. The determination of such would have legal implications for the US parties involved, while foreign units found to have committed gross human rights violations would become ineligible for US training, aid, and other assistance.
Within the past year, investigations by Human Rights Watch, the Associated Press (AP) and the UN Panel of Experts have all documented detainee torture by UAE-affiliated forces in southern Yemen. The AP report also asserted that US personnel participated in the interrogation of the tortured detainees. The House amendment also comes following the confirmation of Gina Haspel as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on May 17. In 2002, Haspel oversaw a US CIA detention site in Thailand where a suspected al-Qaeda member – thought to have been the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Aden in October 2000 – was repeatedly tortured as part of his interrogation.
For the amendment to become law, similar language would have to be adopted by the Senate’s version of the DoD bill, and then survive reconciliation between the House and Senate versions.
On May 29, Reuters reported that talks between Iran, the UK, France and Germany regarding the Yemen conflict had been underway since February, with both Iranian and European officials saying progress was being made and that Tehran was prepared to use its influence to try and bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. The Reuters report is consistent with statements that government officials in various European capitals made during discussions with the Sana’a Center in May, in which they described their Iranian counterparts as expressing a willingness to facilitate talks with the Houthis.
The talks regarding Yemen are being held in parallel to discussions over the future of the Iran nuclear deal and were initiated in the runup to President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the JCPA (see above ‘Washington Exits ‘Iran Deal’ and Escalates Tensions With Tehran’). The initial intent was to address Washington’s concern regarding Iran’s regional role and to showcase Europe’s ability to mediate with Tehran.
At the beginning of May, UAE aircraft transported military vehicles, equipment and some 100 troops to Yemen’s Indian Ocean island of Socotra, subsequently taking control of both the airport and marine terminal. Socotra is the largest landmass of the four-island Socotra Archipelago, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site owing to its biodiversity and populations of rare and endangered species. It also sits at the strategic intersection of shipping lanes between the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the rest of the Indian Ocean.
On May 3, photographs geolocated to Socotra airport circulated on social media, showed C-17 military transport aircraft unloading BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles and military trucks. The news agency AFP reported that the deployment had occurred without the prior knowledge of President Hadi, while also coinciding with a visit to the island by Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid bin Dagher, who on May 5 called the UAE actions “an assault on Yemen’s sovereignty” and refused to leave until the crisis was resolved. The following day, the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MoFAIC) denounced bin Dagher’s statement, saying that Abu Dhabi is “playing a balanced role” in promoting peace, stability and development on Socotra, and that it was “fully aware of the role played by Muslim Brotherhood in instigating such malignant media campaigns against the UAE.”
While throughout the conflict there have been tensions between UAE-backed forces in Yemen and the internationally recognized Yemeni government, this incident marked the first time that Hadi officials and Abu Dhabi openly exchanged direct accusations against each other, putting on public display the rifts between the ostensible allies.
The UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) followed the MoFAIC statement with one of its own, calling the Hadi government’s accusations “fabrications” and also claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood was to be blamed for the crisis.
Yemen’s Ambassador to the UN Khaled al-Yamani said in a May 8 letter (S/2018/440) to the UNSC that the UAE had undertaken “unjustified military action” that reflected the general disagreement between the Yemeni government and Abu Dhabi over national sovereignty. The letter concluded that “the continuation of the misunderstanding and its spread over all the liberated governorates, including the island of Socotra, is clearly damaging and can no longer be concealed, and that its impact has spread to all military and civilian institutions and negatively impacted local public opinion.”
On May 9, the US also weighed in on the situation, with the State Department issuing a statement, saying “[p]olitical dialogue is necessary for the Republic of Yemen Government to rightfully ensure the safety and security of its residents on Socotra.” According to a high level official within the Yemeni government who spoke with the Sana’a Center, Washington’s statement was secured via a direct conversation between US Secretary of State Pompeo and President Hadi; the former having called the latter to seek a Yemeni government statement endorsing President Trump’s decision to exit the Iran deal (see above ‘Washington Exits ‘Iran Deal’ and Escalates Tensions With Tehran’). President Hadi agreed in exchange for the US statement acknowledging Yemeni government sovereignty over Socotra.
Meanwhile, widespread discontent with the Emirati presence led to public protests in Socotra’s capital, Hadibu, with the island’s social media users posting under the Twitter hashtag “Socotra will not become the UAE’s eighth emirate.” Through the second week of May, however, Saudi mediation efforts appeared to gain traction; on May 14, Prime Minister bin Dagher declared in a Facebook post that the crisis was over, spoke about the enduring “brotherhood” between Yemenis, Emiratis and Saudis, and called for the coalition to refocus back on the primary enemies, the Houthis and Iran. Facilitated by the presence of Saudi mediators and a small contingent of troops, the UAE began to withdraw the troops it had deployed to Socotra and relinquished control of the island’s air and sea ports.
In a May 21 letter (S/2018/490) to the UNSC, the UAE’s Permanent Representative to the UN Lana Nusseibeh said that her government regretted the misunderstanding and reiterated Abu Dhabi’s past humanitarian and development support for Socotra. “The situation in Socotra Island has now been fully resolved” she stated in the letter, adding that the UAE “unconditionally recognizes Yemen’s sovereignty over Socotra Island.”
The Yemeni state news agency SABA reported on May 24 that President Hadi had appointed Khaled al-Yamani as his new foreign minister, replacing Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi. Al-Yamani is generally seen as a technocrat deeply loyal to the president.
Al-Yamani had been Yemen’s Permanent Representative to the UN until his new appointment, and will be replaced in his former post by Ahmed Awadh bin Mubarak. In a highly unconventional move, bin Mubarak will become Yemen’s UN representative while also maintaining his prior post as Yemen’s Ambassador to the US.
Through May, coalition-backed forces advancing north from southern Hudaydah governorate made significant progress along the coastal road, repeatedly forcing Houthi fighters to relinquish territory. When speaking with the Sana’a Center last month, Tariq Saleh, the nephew of late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and current commander of the UAE-backed National Resistance Forces fighting in the governorate, confirmed that the near-term goal of the offensive is to route Houthi forces from Hudaydah city.
A prospective coalition-backed campaign against Hudaydah city in the spring of 2017 had been derailed due to a lack of US support and international outcry over the likelihood of massive humanitarian fallout from such a campaign. Given that Hudaydah port and nearby Saleef port are currently the entry points for more than 70 percent of the country’s basic commodities, any interruption in imports there could potentially launch millions of Yemenis, already on the verge of famine, into starvation. Western officials, speaking to the Sana’a Center last month, said Washington and London had given the green light for the current coalition-backed offensive to take Hudaydah city, but with the caveat that the ports were not to be attacked.
The UAE is providing air cover and coordinating the current offensive amongst an assortment of disparate anti-Houthi forces, including al-Amaliqa (Giants Brigades), local Tihama Resistance groups, and Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces. There are two southern approaches to Hudaydah city: one running along the coastline and a second that is several dozen kilometers inland that runs through various populated areas. The coalition-backed offensive has made progress along the coastal route, where Houthi forces have generally withdrawing while planting landmines and improvised explosive devices in their wake to slow the coalition-backed advance – a strategy condemned by human rights groups for its impact of civilians (see below ‘IDPs Face Violations of International Humanitarian Law’). Progress on the inland road had yet to see similar gains as May ended, with anti-Houthi forces yet to enter Zabid, the historic town and World Heritage Site roughly 100 km south of Hudaydah. The Sana’a Center has heard the assessment of military analysts who assert that a successful assault on Hudaydah city will likely require anti-Houthi forces to secure both southern approaches.
During mid-May, anti-Houthi forces cleared territory in the Mawza and al-Wazi’iyah districts and the Khaboub mountains, establishing their hold over southwest Taiz governorate and cutting off access to the neighboring Lahij governorate to the east. Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces and the southern Giants Brigade also took control of al-Amri military camp, in Dhubab district, Taiz governorate. The military installation is the second-largest on Yemen’s west coast, strategically placed at the crossroads of key land and sea supply routes and used as a base to supervise shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
On May 3, the New York Times reported that US special forces personnel had been covertly deployed along the Saudi-Yemeni border to assist the Saudi military in locating and destroying Houthi missiles and launch sites. The troops, composed of “about a dozen Green Berets” were reportedly deployed in December 2017, following a Houthi ballistic missile attack on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport the month before (for more see ‘Yemen at the UN – November 2017 Review’).
A high level Yemeni government figure, speaking to the Sana’a Center last month, said that the US military had also deployed drones in Yemen in support of Yemeni government ground combat operations against Houthi forces.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) previously maintained that direct US military actions in Yemen were focused exclusively on counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the US was not engaged in direct operations against the Houthis. The DoD had also said US troops in Saudi Arabia were focused on border defense, and support for the Saudi-led military coalition was limited to intelligence sharing, aircraft refuelling and logistical support. As recently as April 17, Robert S. Karem, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that 50 US troops were in Saudi Arabia “largely helping on the ballistic missile threat.” The New York Times report noted that the city of Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia, is a hub for these US efforts.
High-level sources in both the Yemeni government and the Houthi leadership confirmed to the Sana’a Center that negotiations were underway in May for a large-scale prisoner exchange between the two sides. The exchange is expected to take place mid-June with the end of Ramadan.
On May 9, a severe shortage of petrol and diesel fuels gripped Aden. Official fuel stations, which had a government regulated retail price ceiling of YR 6,300 per 20 liters of petrol, essentially closed en masse, with the same amount of fuel continuing to sell on the parallel black market for upwards of YR 8,000.
In March this year, President Hadi had ordered the liberalization of fuel imports in what the government said was an attempt to try and address widespread fuel shortages. At the time the Sana’a Center economists predicted the move would cause downward pressure on the value of the domestic currency and in turn increase fuel prices (for details see ‘Yemen at the UN – March 2018 Review’). Just prior to Hadi’s announcement in March, the official retail price cap for 20 litres of petrol had been YR 3,700.
The shortage last month lasted three days, ending when the authorities intervened to stabilize prices and reopen the official fuel stations. As of the end of May, however, it was unclear what the primary factors were behind the fuel shortage. Sana’a Center economists posit that it is likely that fuel station owners, tracking both global market prices and domestic currency depreciation in Yemen, anticipated fuel price increases. Looking to take advantage of the situation they acted as a cartel by announcing the fuel shortage, ceased selling their fuel to the public and instead sold it to the black market.
Notably, the governors of Marib and Hadramawt – both allies of the Yemeni government – did not liberalize fuel imports in their areas when President Hadi issued his March decree. At the end of May, 20 liters of petrol in Marib was selling for YR 3,500 at official retailers, and in Hadramawt for YR 5,800.
On May 16, Mohammed Zammam visited Aden for the second time since his appointment as Governor of the Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) to hold meetings with the CBY management, Yemeni banks, exchange companies, private sector actors, and government agencies to discuss the bank’s monetary policy. According to Aden-based banking sector sources, the meetings built on CBY policy interventions announced last month. Discussions focused on the conditions attached to the US$2 billion Saudi deposit made available to the CBY in April, and set up an implementation framework for effective utilization of these funds. The funds have already been partly allocated to support imports of five staple goods – wheat, rice, sugar, milk and edible oil – set to start at the beginning of June. In addition, the governor announced that from June 1, public servants would be paid through commercial banks, in an attempt to ease the banks’ liquidity crisis and restore trust in the banking sector.
There were also discussions around fostering greater coordination and cooperation on fiscal and monetary policy between the Ministry of Finance, customs and taxes authorities and the central bank. This is to ensure tighter control over the collection of government dues and public spending and to restore accounts held outside the CBY. A source working in the Aden banking sector said that in the past three months the CBY has recouped some US$400 million in oil revenues from al-Massila block in Hadramawt that had been transferred to accounts outside the CBY.
On May 25, the Sana’a Center organized a private focus group meeting at the Yemen Banks Association in Sana’a with the heads of the country’s 13 largest banks. Discussions highlighted the most crucial challenges facing the banking sector, both systemic – such as the complications arising from operating in a country where two central banks are issuing divergent policies – and immediate – such as liquidity crisis brought on by the increased demand for hard currency during Ramadan. Further discussions focused on the Houthi-controlled authorities refusal to allow the banks to accept the new large-denomination Yemeni rial banknotes, printed in Russia, which the Yemeni government has been issuing from Aden. The bankers noted that Houthi security forces had arrested colleagues for accepting these new banknotes.
On May 10, Mahdi al-Mashat, the President of the Supreme Political Council – the governing body in Houthi-controlled areas – ordered the Sana’a-based CBY to seize the financial assets of late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
On May 19, the Houthi authorities also imposed new fees on private sector electricity providers, with the latter expected to pass on the increased costs to consumers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced the first-ever oral cholera vaccination campaign in Yemen was launched between May 6 and 15. While the WHO continues to state that Yemen is experiencing the largest cholera outbreak in the world, the number of new cases has largely stabilized through the past several months. Fears of a renewed outbreak have increased recently, however, with the onset of Yemen’s rainy season, which runs from mid-April to the end of August.
On May 3, a scientific analysis of the cholera outbreak to date found that it was likely for there to be an upsurge in new cases during the current rainy season. The research project, funded by Yemeni health authorities, the WHO and Doctors Without Borders, analyzed surveillance data on the two cholera outbreaks of late September 2016 and late April 2017. It concluded that “the small first cholera epidemic wave seeded cholera across Yemen during the dry season. When the rains returned in April, 2017, they triggered widespread cholera transmission that led to the large second wave. These results suggest that cholera could resurge during the ongoing 2018 rainy season if transmission remains active.”
In this context, this month’s vaccination campaign was implemented by the WHO, the UN Children’s Fund and Yemen’s national health authorities as part of their integrated cholera response plan, which targeted almost half a million people in five Aden districts. The WHO said it was still negotiating countrywide approval to implement the campaign in other governorates, targeting at least 4 million people. According to aid workers, Houthi officials’ refusal has delayed the implementation of vaccination campaigns for almost a year.
In the second half of May, two cyclones crossed the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, reaching coastal areas in Yemen, Oman, and the Horn of Africa. The first, Cyclone Sagar, mostly affected the Horn of Africa, though it also caused heavy rains and flash floods in southern Yemen, increasing its vulnerability to the second cyclone that followed less than a week later. On May 22, a tropical storm in the southwest Arabian Sea intensified into what became known as Cyclone Mekunu, reaching Socotra a little more than 24 hours later. The government declared a state of emergency on May 24 and called upon the Saudi-led military coalition to immediately provide humanitarian assistance. After hitting Socotra, Cyclone Mekunu made landfall along the Oman-Yemen coastline, passing through Mahrah governorate on May 26.
By May 27, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had documented that more than 500 families from the towns of Hadibu and Qalansiyah had been evacuated to public buildings. On May 26, the Emirati News Agency reported that a first Emirati relief plane had delivered 40 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Socotra. As of May 30, Saudi Arabia had also delivered four relief planes of aid. The following day, Riyadh announced the opening of the first Socotra office for the Saudi Reconstruction Program in Yemen. UN agencies were also scheduled to send three rotations of emergency supplies within the week between May 28 and June 3.
By the end of the month, OCHA concluded that the cyclone’s impact on Socotra and Yemen’s eastern coastline had been “less severe than originally feared.” Nevertheless, 20 people were counted as dead in Socotra, including missing persons that could not be found, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Food stocks have been largely destroyed, property and infrastructure badly damaged, and water wells and water networks in the towns of Hadibu and Qalansiyah partly damaged, with only one water well known to be functional in Hadibu.
On May 26, Socotra’s air and sea ports resumed functioning, but access to the island’s eastern and southern villages remained largely restricted. Concerns remained over the situation of the 2,500 families living on Abd al-Quri and Samhah islands, with whom no contact had been made since the cyclone had passed the Socotra archipelago. Livelihoods in Socotra are also expected to be heavily affected, given the high percentage of fishermen and farmers on Socotra; some 120 fishing boats are thought to have been lost in the cyclone.
In al-Mahrah governorate, 20 people were reportedly injured and four dead. Buildings, vehicles, power lines and generators were destroyed, agricultural equipment and warehouses in al-Gaydah city damaged, and roads between Hadramawt and al-Mahrah partly damaged or blocked. As of May 30, some 2,000 people had been isolated in Alaibri city for three consecutive days due to flood water.
On May 24, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock issued a statement on the situation in Yemen, expressing deep concern about the recent escalation of hostilities, increasing restrictions on humanitarian activities, and decreasing commercial imports. He noted that “[s]ome 8.4 million people are severely food insecure and at risk of starvation. If conditions do not improve, a further 10 million people will fall into this category by the end of the year.”
Lowcock raised particular concern over the recent decline in commercial food imports through Yemen’s Red Sea ports. While commending recent discussions and agreements to accelerate the processing of vessels, Lowcock called on the Yemeni government, “with the support of the Coalition, to take active steps to boost commercial imports of food, fuel and humanitarian supplies through all Yemen’s ports.” Lowcock reported that restrictions on humanitarian action in Yemen continued, including the detention of humanitarian staff and the delay or denial of visas for them in northern areas.
On May 7, Saudi-led military coalition airstrikes targeted the Houthi-run Presidential Office building in Sana’a, located in a densely populated area with several schools nearby. According to Sana’a Center sources, the office was occupied by a full staff of civilian personnel at the time. At least six people were killed and 30 injured.
Senior Houthi leader and head of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, was reportedly in the building’s basement at the time of the strikes. He was unharmed in the incident.
On May 17, Amnesty International released a report on violations of international humanitarian law that belligerent parties in Yemen have committed against IDPs fleeing the frontlines along the Red Sea coast. According to the report, Houthi forces have put civilians’ lives at risk by conducting indiscriminate attacks on populated areas, notably through the use of imprecise weapons such as mortars, and stationing fighters and military vehicles in residential areas.
Amnesty noted that Houthi forces “have also allegedly mined roads and have otherwise prevented civilians from leaving; in other cases they have expelled people from their homes in areas recently taken from government control.” Amnesty International further reported that Houthi forces had forcibly recruited male civilians, including minors. The report also said that Saudi-led military coalition airstrikes had killed and injured civilians.
On May 2, the southern Yemen news outlet Aden al-Ghad reported that the Hadi government had sent a formal letter to the UAE asking for information on the fate of 12 detainees arrested in Aden. This came about following the mothers of the detainees staging public protests. Local Sana’a Center sources confirmed that the letter had been sent, signed by the Interior Minister Ahmed bin Ahmed al-Maysari, who also asked the UAE to refer the detainees to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Al-Maysari also sent a letter to the Director of Aden Security General Shalal Shaya, demanding the transfer of the detainees and their files to the general attorney. According to Aden al-Ghad, this was the first time that the government had addressed the UAE regarding the issue of detainees in Aden.
Last year, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press had both published investigative reports revealing the use of secret detention facilities, torture and forced disappearances by UAE-backed forces in Aden and Hadramawt governorates (for more see ‘Yemen at the UN – June 2017 Review’).
This report was prepared by Farea al-Muslimi, Waleed Alhariri, Victoria K. Sauer, Ali Abdullah, Spencer Osberg, Ghaidaa Alrashidy, Wadhah Alawlaqi, Holly Topham, Maged al-Madhaji, Anthony Biswell, Osama al-Rawhani, Taima Al-Iriani and Mansour Rageh.
Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic, humanitarian, and human rights developments on the ground.
This month’s report was developed with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
In April, Saleh Ali al-Samad, a senior Houthi official and the head of the Supreme Political Council in Sana’a, was killed by an air-to-ground missile strike in Hudaydah city. Al-Samad was one of the most prominent political figures within the Houthi leadership structure and is the group’s most senior member to have been killed thus far in the conflict. His death will likely have far reaching implications for both the Houthis and the UN’s renewed mediation efforts to end the Yemen conflict.
In March, the Saudi-led military coalition intervention in Yemen, dubbed ‘Operation Decisive Storm’, entered its fourth year. To mark the occasion, Houthi forces fired seven ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia shortly before midnight on March 25, which the Saudi military claimed its defense systems intercepted. Riyadh responded by accusing Iran of having supplied the Houthis with the missiles and warned that Saudi Arabia had a right to “strike back” (see ‘Military Developments’).
The United Nations Security Council adopted a wide-ranging new Presidential Statement regarding Yemen calling for, among other things, the full and sustained opening of all of Yemen’s ports to humanitarian and commercial imports, stressing the need for increased humanitarian access to Sana’a International Airport, and reaffirming that the denial of humanitarian access may constitute a violation of international humanitarian law (see ‘A New Security Council Presidential Statement’).
Martin Griffiths officially took over the post of Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen. Griffiths began his tenure with a trip to Riyadh where he met Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi and other high ranking government officials; the new Special Envoy ended the month with a week-long visit to Sana’a, where he met with Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi via conference call (see ‘The New Special Envoy’s First Month’).
Last month senior Houthi negotiator and spokesperson Mohammed Abdel Salam also confirmed to the Sana’a Center that the Houthis were engaged in conversations with Saudi representatives in Oman, facilitated by the United Kingdom and involving the Special Envoy (see ‘Saudi-Houthi Talks in Muscat’).
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman launched a tour of coalition allies that took him to Egypt, the United Kingdom and the United States, with opposition lawmakers in both of the latter raising concerns regarding their countries’ complicity in war crimes given their support for the coalition intervention in Yemen (see ‘Saudi Crown Prince visits coalition allies’).
Meanwhile the UN, Sweden and Switzerland co-hosted a High-Level Pledging Event in Geneva at the beginning of April, at which US$2.01 billion were pledged by 40 states and organizations, equal to almost 68 percent of the UN’s US$2.96 billion Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan funding requirements. Saudi Arabia and the UAE together contributed almost US$1 billion (see ‘High-level Pledging Event Draws $2 Billion in Commitments’).
In Yemen, the fragmentation of the General People’s Congress party – previously headed by the late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh – continued amongst the various factions based around Yemen and in regional capitals (see ‘Political Developments’).
United Arab Emirates-backed Security Belt Forces launched a campaign to clear al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants from the Mahfad district of Abyan governorate as part of ‘Operation Sweeping Torrent’, which has seen similar campaigns undertaken in the governorates of Hadramawt and Shabwa (see ‘Continued Expansion of Anti-AQAP Operations in South Yemen’).
President Hadi ordered the liberalization of fuel imports in government controlled areas in an attempt to address widespread fuel shortages (see ‘Economic Developments in Yemeni Government Controlled Areas’). Meanwhile in Houthi-controlled areas widespread cooking gas shortages continued and the authorities introduced an electronic Yemeni rial to try and address the cash liquidity crisis (see ‘Economic Developments in Houthi-controlled Areas‘).
Meanwhile, during the 37th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore reported that Saudi-led military coalition air strikes were responsible for 61 percent of recorded civilian casualties in the Yemen conflict since 2015 (see ‘The UN Human Rights Council’).
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted a new Presidential Statement (S/PRST/2018/5) regarding Yemen on March 15 following more than a month of discussions and negotiations. A UNSC Presidential Statement is a document adopted by council consensus as UNSC policy and publicly presented by the council president, in this case Karel Jan Gustaaf van Oosterom of the Netherlands, who was council president for March.
The United Kingdom, Kuwait, the Netherlands and Sweden were the primary parties to the negotiations, which also involved direct consultations with non-UNSC member state Saudi Arabia. Discussions began towards the end of January, with the Netherlands and Sweden pushing for a UNSC resolution regarding Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. Simultaneously, Kuwait was calling for UNSC recognition of the Yemen Comprehensive Humanitarian Operations (YCHO) plan, which the Saudi-led military coalition intervening in the Yemen conflict announced in January. These led the UK, as penholder on Yemen, to begin pursuing a Presidential Statement, as it had already signaled it would do in late 2017. On February 13, the UK then submitted a draft text to council members, following which intensive negotiations on the language began (details available here).
The fact that the UK put forward a Presidential Statement, rather than a resolution, was questioned by both the Netherlands and Sweden. A Presidential Statement is considered less weighty than a UNSC resolution and lacks the mandatory enforcement power of a Chapter 7 resolution. Thus, while important as a public statement asserting Security Council policy, the impact of a Presidential Statement is determined by further council actions, or lack thereof, to follow up on the text.
The final Presidential Statement noted the UNSC’s “grave concern” regarding the deteriorating humanitarian crisis (see below ‘Humanitarian Developments’) and “grave distress” at the “indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas… including large numbers of civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects.”
The UNSC called on all parties to the conflict to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law, though only Houthi forces were censured by name regarding attacks against civilians. Five non-permanent member states – Bolivia, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland and Sweden – as well as Russia opposed the UK’s inclusion in the draft text of a paragraph regarding Houthi ballistic missile attacks against Saudi Arabia; Kuwait, the United Kingdom and the United States insisted, however, and in the end the Presidential Statement contained a sentence stating that the UNSC “condemns in the strongest possible terms” these Houthi attacks.
Kuwait also successfully lobbied to have references to Saudi-led military coalition airstrikes removed and weaken the language regarding accountability for violations in Yemen. Notably, the UNSC also heard last month from Kate Gilmore, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, who reported on March 22 that coalition airstrikes have been responsible for 61 percent of all verified civilian casualties in Yemen since 2015 (see ‘Human Rights and War Crimes Developments’ below).
In the Presidential Statement the UNSC also called on all parties to facilitate access across Yemen for humanitarian supplies and personnel and noted with “great concern the impact that access restrictions on commercial and humanitarian imports have on the humanitarian situation.” The Security Council then called for the “full and sustained” opening of all of Yemen’s ports for commercial and humanitarian cargo, making specific mention of the Red Sea ports of Hudaydah and Saleef, and called for increased humanitarian access to Sana’a International Airport. The Presidential Statement then reaffirmed “that denial of humanitarian access can constitute a violation of international humanitarian law.”
The Presidential Statement called on UN member states to “immediately disburse outstanding pledges and provide additional donor support” in the lead up to the April 3 Geneva Pledging Conference for Yemen, co-hosted by the UN and the governments of Sweden and Switzerland (see below ‘Humanitarian Developments’). The pledging conference was intended to raise funds for the UN’s US$2.96 billion 2018 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan. The Presidential Statement said it “welcomes” the almost US$1 billion pledge to the UN response plan Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced, the US$500 million the coalition partners said they would raise from other regional donors; the UNSC also notes “with appreciation” the coalition’s YCHO announcement.
The UNSC expressed concern regarding Yemen’s economy, called on the internationally recognized Government of Yemen to prioritize paying public sector salaries in its 2018 budget, and recognized the need to strengthen the Central Bank of Yemen “to develop and implement a transparent national monetary policy.”
The Security Council called on all UN member states to fully implement the UN arms embargo against Houthi-allied forces. The Presidential Statement specifically noted that this includes member states reporting to the Yemen Sanctions Committee any cargo vessel inspections undertaken beyond the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM), while stressing the need for all parties to “prevent any adverse effects on the delivery of commercial or humanitarian goods.” This appeared to be in reference to the Saudi-led military coalition’s regular practice of inspecting vessels destined for Hudaydah and Saleef ports which the UNVIM has already cleared. The Panel of Experts on Yemen, part of the Yemen Sanctions Committee, has on multiple occasions noted that the coalition has failed to report any of these inspections, and in November 2017 the panel submitted a confidential study detailing that the “imposition of access restrictions is another attempt by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition to use resolution 2216 as justification for obstructing the delivery of commodities that are essentially civilian in nature.”
The UNSC then noted that it takes “extremely seriously” attempted Houthi attacks against shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb strait, and condemned the deployment of sea mines by the Houthis and other non-state actors.
The Security Council stated that “the humanitarian situation will continue to deteriorate in the absence of an inclusive political solution,” and called on all warring parties “to abandon pre-conditions and engage in good faith with the UN-led process, with the meaningful participation of women and other underrepresented groups at all levels.” The UNSC welcomed the appointment of Martin Griffiths as the new UN Special Envoy for Yemen, and then reaffirmed the Security Council’s commitment to Yemen’s “unity, sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.”
Also at the UNSC last month, on March 28 the council issued a press statement condemning “in the strongest possible terms” multiple Houthi missile launches into Saudi Arabia days earlier, on the third anniversary of the beginning of the Saudi-led military coalition intervention in Yemen (see below ‘Military Developments’).
On March 19, Martin Griffiths officially took over the post of Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen, replacing Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. In a statement regarding the event, Griffiths said that he would pursue a political process “based on the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] Initiative and its Implementation Mechanism, the National Dialogue Conference outcomes, and all relevant Security Council resolutions.” He noted that a credible process will demand flexibility, compromises and a prioritization of the national interest by all sides. He added that he looked “forward to working with the Government of Yemen and engaging with all stakeholders, without exception.”
The following day Griffiths was in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where he met with Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi and other high ranking government officials, including Hadi’s former Vice President and former Prime Minister Khaled Bahah. On March 24, Griffiths began a week-long visit to Sana’a, which included a meeting with Houthi leader Abdulmalek al-Houthi via conference call. Notably, Houthi leaders had banned the previous Special Envoy from entering Houthi-controlled areas and had refused to meet with Ould Cheikh Ahmed for most of his last year in office.
The UN also appointed a new humanitarian coordinator for Yemen in March; Lise Grande, formerly the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. She took over the post from Jamie McGoldrick, who in February was appointed as the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Process.
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman launched an international tour of coalition allies in March, beginning with a visit to Egypt to meet President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on March 4.
On March 7, the same day Salman’s three-day UK visit began, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn asserted in a House of Commons debate that British military advisers were “directing the war” the Saudi-led military coalition was waging in Yemen. Corbyn said that through this support and British arms sales to Riyadh — which totalled US$1.5 billion in 2017 — the UK government was “colluding in what the United Nations says is evidence of war crimes.” The following day protests against Britain’s role in the Yemen war and Prime Minister Theresa May’s meeting with the Crown Prince took place at Downing Street.
On March 9, the UK government approved the sale of 48 Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia; although details of the deal were not released, a previous agreement with Qatar to sell half as many Typhoons aircraft was worth close to US$7 billion. The same day the Saudi and UK governments issued a joint statement affirming many aspects of the long-term strategic partnership between the two governments; in regards to Yemen, this included the two confirming the need for a political solution to the conflict and a commitment to continuing to work together to address the humanitarian crisis. The UK also “welcomed” Riyadh’s “continuing commitment to ensuring that the Coalition’s military campaign is conducted in accordance with international humanitarian law,” (see below ‘Human Rights and War Crimes Developments’).
On March 20, Salman met with US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, where he began a three-week tour of the US. On the same day, the US Senate voted 55-44 to reject a motion that would have forced the US to withdraw support for the Saudi-led military coalition’s operations in Yemen. The resolution, introduced at the end of February, had been championed by a bipartisan group of senators including independent Bernie Sanders, Republican Mike Lee, and Democrat Chris Murphy. Various Pentagon officials had publicly opposed the motion.
Following Salman’s White House visit, the US administration announced new arms sales to Saudi Arabia valued at more than US$1 billion.
Senior Houthi negotiator and spokesperson Mohammed Abdel Salam confirmed to the Sana’a Center during a discussion in Muscat in March that he was engaged in conversations with Saudi representatives in Oman. The conversations were being facilitated by UK officials and involved the new UN Special Envoy. Abdel Salam also confirmed that he had recently traveled to Germany and Turkey to discuss these countries’ role in facilitating peace negotiations.
This new regional and international Houthi communications outreach can be seen as an attempt to end the isolation they have been experiencing since the collapse of the alliance between them and late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Prior to the Houthis killing Saleh in December 2017, the former president and his associates had managed most of the alliance’s international relations.
In March, it was apparent that Yemen’s General People’s Congress (GPC) party was continuing to fragment, a process that began following the killing of the GPC’s founder and leader, the late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in December 2017. Inside Yemen widening divisions were playing out between different party factions. Internal party developments are also being closely monitored by senior GPC officials spread across various regional capitals that include Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo. On March 1, the GPC faction in Sana’a (headed by Sadeq Amin Abu Ras) rejected the decision by the Taiz-based GPC faction (headed by Arif Jamal, who is also the Deputy Governor of Taiz) to recognize President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi as head of the GPC party. (Although a number of GPC Riyadh-based members remain loyal to Hadi, it is important to note that he was removed as the GPC’s secretary-general in late 2014). In mid-March, the Sana’a-based GPC faction dismissed Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid bin Dagher’s public calls for party unity.
Based on Sana’a Center conversations held with several GPC officials in Cairo, there appears to be a direct acknowledgement among party ranks of the difficult adjustment period that the GPC finds itself in and an apparent reluctance to hold internal party leadership elections at the present time. One Cairo-based GPC official advocated for a joint leadership council in a bid to prevent the party’s increased fragmentation and to ensure the party remains an active player both inside and outside Yemen.
To mark the third anniversary of the beginning of the Saudi-led military coalition intervention in Yemen, Houthi forces reportedly fired seven ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia shortly before midnight on March 25. Saudi forces claim to have intercepted three ballistic missiles above Riyadh, another two over Jazan, and thwarted another two separate missile attacks aimed at Najran and Khamis Mushait, located in the south of the country near the shared Saudi-Yemeni border. One of the missiles reportedly intercepted over Riyadh resulted in the death of an Egyptian national and the wounding of others after debris fell on a home in the Saudi capital.
Saudi Arabia responded to the attacks by accusing Iran of having supplied the Houthis with the missiles that were fired at the Kingdom. Saudi-led military coalition spokesperson Col. Turki al-Maliki declared that the attacks “could not have happened without support from Iran, which has supplied the Houthis with ballistic missiles,” and warned that Saudi Arabia had a right to “strike back.” Iranian officials denied such claims, while the UN Security Council and the United States condemned the Houthis missile attacks.
The most recent Houthi ballistic missile attacks against Saudi Arabia bore certain similarities with an earlier ballistic missile attack on November 4, with the purported effectiveness of the Saudi Patriot missile air defense system once again being questioned. The Saudi-led military coalition spokesperson, Col. Turki al-Maliki, claimed that all seven ballistic missiles were successfully intercepted. Such a claim was challenged by video footage that emerged related to the missile attacks in Riyadh, including one video that appears to show a Patriot missile changing course shortly after being launched.
The missile attack – coming three years to the day that the Saudi-led military coalition intervention in Yemen began – also held much symbolism, showing that the Houthis continue to be able to threaten Saudi national security despite the coalition’s ongoing campaign to force them into submission.
On March 7, Security Belt Forces in Abyan launched “Operation Sweeping Torrent” that aimed to clear Mahfad district, northwestern Abyan, of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants. The Commander of the Abyan Security Belt Forces, Abdul Latif al-Sayyed, headed the operation. According to local media reports, Abyan Security Belt Forces arrested nine local AQAP commanders following the launch of the operation, including a man identified as Saleh Ahmed Lakra’a, the alleged AQAP emir in Mahfad; in addition to killing a man identified as the deputy emir, Nasser Mohsen Basabreen. “Operation Sweeping Torrent” is the latest of a series of recent UAE-backed counterterrorism operations targeting AQAP enclaves in Hadramawt, Shabwa, and Abyan governorates.
On March 11, the Emirates News Agency said that “Operation Sweeping Torrent” had reached a successful conclusion with Security Belt Forces having cleared Mahfad district of AQAP militants with the support of the Saudi-led coalition. Whether AQAP militants in Mahfad withdrew from the district to avoid engaging with a superior force, however, is unclear.
Saudi Arabia deployed ground forces in Haradh city, Hajjah governorate, on March 6, as part of an ongoing offensive that aims to clear Haradh city of Houthi fighters. The Saudi military joined a contingent of Sudanese and Yemeni government forces already operating on the ground in Haradh district. Yemeni government troops previously gained control of Midi port in January 2016 but have since failed to make any significant inroads either in Midi district or the neighboring Haradh district.
The expansion of anti-Houthi operations in Haradh is representative of attempts to increasingly pressure the Houthis on multiple fronts, including in the Houthi stronghold of Sa’ada governorate. Anti-Houthi operations in Sa’ada, including those targeting key roads linking Sa’ada and the neighbouring al-Jawf governorate, continued throughout March.
On March 1, media reports emerged that the Government of Yemen was planning to relocate the Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) headquarters from the southern Yemeni city of Aden to Amman, Jordan. CBY governor Mohammad Zammam, who took over the post less than a month earlier, subsequently denied such and said the rumors were being spread in social media.
Days later, on May 3, the CBY governor was again forced to speak publicly to dispel multiple media reports that the US$2 billion Saudi deposit at the Aden CBY had been delayed. Sana’a Center sources reported at the beginning of April that the Saudi deposit was being held at the US Federal Reserve.
On March 5, President Hadi ordered the liberalization of fuel imports in government controlled areas in an attempt to address widespread fuel shortages. Prior to this decision a private contractor, Ahmed al-Essi, and the National Petroleum Company had held a monopoly on fuel imports and distribution, respectively. Sana’a Center economists expect Hadi’s move will result in downward pressure on the value of the Yemeni rial (YR), mirroring the impact after Houthi authorities in Sana’a took similar moves to deregulate fuel imports in 2015. Then, fuel importation cartels rapidly accumulated wealth, with their subsequent demand for US dollars in the market essentially becoming insensitive to fluctuations in the rial exchange rate.
In the week following Hadi’s announcement, the governors of both Marib and Hadramawt declared that they would not allow the deregulation of fuel imports in their governorates.
Also at the beginning of March, the United Arab Emirates, which generally controls access to the ports in Yemeni government-affiliated areas, blocked cargo ships carrying some YR 170 billion from entering the port of Aden. The banknotes, printed in Russia, were intended to allow the government to pay civil servant salaries. The CBY has previously complained that the UAE – whose officials have long accused the Hadi government of corruption – have prevented airplanes with cash deliveries from landing at the airport in Aden. In this case, the blockade of the ships lasted six days before they were permitted to dock.
On March 12 and 13, CBY Governor Zammam was in Beirut, Lebanon, where he met the Governor of the Lebanese Central Bank, Riad Salameh, for consultations about issuing foreign currency government bonds. According to Sana’a Center sources, however, the CBY’s recent history and current status has heavily eroded trust in the market and there would likely be little to no appetite for a Government of Yemen debt issuance, regardless of the interest rate attached to the bond. While in Beirut, Governor Zammam also met with representatives from the International Finance Corporation, which is part of the World Bank Group.
On March 25, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a report on cooking gas and fuel shortages. It noted that in Houthi-controlled areas a cylinder of cooking gas had risen in retail price from YR 5,000 three weeks earlier to between YR 8,000 to YR 10,000, depending on the area. While official outlets are selling gas at YR 4,000, anecdotal reports from Sana’a and other areas indicated that customers had to wait in line for up to three days to purchase gas at the official price, while OCHA noted that many families and bakeries had resorted to burning wood.
Sana’a Center sources reported that the cooking gas shortage began in February after Houthi authorities attempted to set a fixed price per cylinder of YR 3,000, leading to a surge in black market vending. Given renewed fighting on the main road between Sana’a and Marib – the latter of which is the primary source of cooking gas in Yemen – the Sana’a Center predicts further rapid increases in cooking gas prices in Houthi-controlled areas.
Also in Houthi-controlled areas, in another attempt to address the cash liquidity crisis, the Sana’a-based CBY launched an electronic version of the rial to enable purchases via mobile phone. The expectation is that there will be a two-month pilot program before there are attempts to bring the system into wider use.
A Sana’a Center analysis of the plan noted that the CBY had drawn up the regulation for the electronic rial in 2014, but while the previous plan had envisioned a commercial bank-led model, the current system has the Yemen Mobile company taking the lead. Sana’a Center analysis also noted that if the electronic rial system is effectively “prepaid,” it will have little short-term impact on the liquidity crisis. If, however, the authorities attempt to use it to pay civil servant salaries, as is expected after the pilot program, the results will likely be similar to those of the voucher program the authorities in Sana’a attempted in April 2017: the electronic rial will create pressure on the local currency through increased demand for imported commodities, and quickly a price disparity will become apparent in the market where vendors will charge one price in exchange for physical banknotes and another for electronic rials. Among the long-term consequences will likely be the destruction of public trust in electronic transactions.
UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Geert Cappealaere, after completing a field visit to Yemen last month, gave a wide-ranging media address. He noted that: “We talk about the health crisis in Yemen, we talk about the health emergency, about the famine in Yemen, looming at every corner. But what we talk much less about is the education crisis in Yemen.”
Cappealaere then outlined the decline in children’s school attendance rates during the conflict: “Today in Yemen, compared to three years ago, half a million more children are not able any longer to go to school. Today, close to 2 million Yemeni boys and girls are not attending school or never had a chance to.” Cappealaere asserted that according to data verified by UNICEF an estimated 2,500 schools in Yemen “are no longer serving for educational purposes,” with an undisclosed number of schools either “destroyed by the war” or now “being used for military purposes” as well as “for hosting displaced people.“
The UNICEF director also touched on some of the major associated problems borne out of the conflict that are impacting schools that remain open, such as the fact that close to three quarters of Yemeni teachers have not received a salary for more than a year and the lack of investment contributing to a highly underdeveloped educational system. “Yemeni children learn from textbooks that are decades old while others elsewhere in the world have access to internet, have their iPads to learn from.”
Cappealaere stated that: “The education sector in Yemen is on the verge of collapse. It is collapsing. I have seen that in every single school I visited and heard that from every single teacher I spoke to.” He also warned of the societal impact of Yemen’s faltering educational system, which has been further compounded by increased unemployment and poverty levels, with many children being pushed into early marriage or child labor and at least 2,400 others recruited by different armed groups since March 2015. To combat poverty and the effects of unpaid salaries, UNICEF started a second round of cash transfers on March 26, funded by the World Bank’s International Development Association. The first round, which was completed in October 2017, had offered some support to about 30 percent of Yemen’s population.
In support of the Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan (YHRP) 2018, the UN, Sweden and Switzerland co-hosted a High-Level Pledging Event at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on April 3. Donations totaling US$2.01 billion were pledged by 40 states and organizations, equaling almost 68 percent of the US$2.96 billion YHRP funding requirements. This included US$930 million that had already been provided by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the largest contributors, on March 27.
At a similar pledging event in April 2017, US$1.1 billion had been pledged for the previous YHRP. By mid-December 2017, only 70.5 percent of the US$2.3 billion appeal had been provided by the international community.
On March 21, during the 37th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore reported on the human rights situation in Yemen, opening up a general debate on technical assistance and capacity building.
Gilmore stated that since the beginning of the Saudi-led coalition military intervention in Yemen, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had officially documented 6,100 civilian casualties, including 1,491 children, and 9,683 injuries. Gilmore noted that the official monthly tally of civilian casualties has increased during the past six months, reaching a peak in December 2017, when 714 civilian deaths were recorded.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Saudi-led military coalition airstrikes accounted for the majority (61 percent) of all civilian casualties, while Houthi forces’ indiscriminate shelling of and sniper fire against residential areas was identified as the second leading cause.
Many observers of the Yemen conflict suggest the UN’s official numbers dramatically underestimate the civilian death toll from the conflict.
On March 1, armed gunmen raided the offices of the al-Shomou Foundation in Aden and set fire to its printing presses. According to the president of al-Shomou Foundation, Saif al-Haderi, the unidentified gunmen “arrived in vehicles and wore uniforms” commonly associated with Aden’s Security Belt Forces. Al-Shomou Foundation is thought to be close to the Yemeni government and specifically Vice President Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar.
In a separate attack on March 23, unidentified gunmen targeted al-Shomou Foundation’s Aden offices for the second time in the space of a month. The gunmen abducted at least seven people from the offices and stole money and equipment. On the same day, the home of the al-Shomou Foundation director was also raided.
This report was prepared by Waleed Alhariri, Spencer Osberg, Farea al-Muslimi, Anthony Biswell, Ali Abdullah, Victoria K. Sauer, Taima Al-Iriani and Nickolas Ask.
Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic, humanitarian, and human rights developments on the ground.
This month’s report was developed with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
In February, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) formally adopted a highly politicized UN Panel of Experts report on Yemen. The report – one aspect of which asserts Iran is in non-compliance with the UN arms embargo on Yemen – was seized upon by the United States and its allies at the UNSC as an opportunity to push for council action against Iran (see ‘UN Panel of Experts Report’).
Russia led the opposition to this push at the Security Council, eventually exercising its veto power to quash a United Kingdom draft resolution that Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said would have “dangerous, destabilising ramifications, not only for Yemen but the region as a whole” (see ‘Russia’s Veto’).
Last month also saw UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres officially appoint Martin Griffiths of the UK as the new UN Special Envoy for Yemen. The three-year tenure of the outgoing Special Envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, saw three rounds of failed UN-led peace negotiations and numerous failed ceasefire agreements; in 2017 Ould Cheikh Ahmed was unable to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table at all (see ‘A New UN Special Envoy for Yemen’).
In Yemen, following widespread clashes in the southern city of Aden at the end of January, relative calm prevailed over the city in February. Aiderous al-Zubaidi, leader of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), made moves to allay concerns within the Saudi-led military coalition that conflict in Aden between the STC fighters and Yemeni government troops had weakened the larger military efforts against the Houthis (see ‘Military Developments’).
In February, Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi also sacked the governor of the Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) in Aden, Monasser al-Quaiti. His replacement, former finance Minister Mohammad Zammam, subsequently met with Saudi officials to finalize terms for the CBY to access the US$2 billion deposit Riyadh made at the CBY in January 2018 (see ‘Economic Developments’).
Also last month, the Director of Operations and Advocacy at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, John Ging, highlighted that as a result of an escalation of fighting since November, a further 100,000 Yemenis have been displaced from their homes (see ‘Humanitarian Developments’).
On February 15, a United Nations Panel of Experts on Yemen report was formally adopted. The report had been circulated and discussed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) in January, with aspects of the document, which was not then public, also being obtained by the press. Media reports at the time focused almost exclusively on the section of the report that indicated Iran was in non-compliance with UNSC Resolution 2216 for failing to take precautions to prevent Iranian-manufactured military equipment from being transferred to Houthi fighters in Yemen. Since the inauguration of United States President Donald Trump, the US administration has advanced a characterisation of the Houthis as agents of Iran and a policy that aims to “hit Iran in Yemen.” Since late 2017, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has been the central public figure of this campaign. Haley has regularly alleged illegal Iranian involvement in the Yemen conflict and used such allegations as a basis from which to cast Iran as a threat to international peace and security, and push for more assertive international action against Tehran. The day after the release of the UN Panel of Experts report Haley issued a statement saying it “was time for the Security Council to act” against Iran for its involvement in Yemen. In a February 17 New York Times op-ed she reiterated this point. In regards to the Panel’s findings, Haley wrote in her op-ed that “some members of the United Nations don’t want to hear it because it is further proof that Iran is defying Security Council resolutions, and the pressure will be on the UN to do something about it.” Through the first half of February, the United Kingdom consulted with UNSC members regarding a resolution to renew the mandate of the Panel of Experts – normally a routine procedure. On February 16, the UK submitted a draft resolution including non-routine passages condemning Iran for violating the arms embargo on Yemen and asserting that these violations required the UNSC to take further measures. China and Russia subsequently objected to the language against Iran, saying that the Panel of Experts had not met the necessary standard of evidence necessary to deem that Iran was in non-compliance, pointing out that the Experts had offered no clear determination regarding how the weapons arrived in the Houthi arsenal. On February 21, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the UN, Gholamali Khoshroo, addressed the UN Secretary-General and the President of the Security Council in an official letter (S/2018/145). The letter stated that Iran “categorically rejects all allegations” against it contained in the Panel of Experts report, and that the Panel’s findings regarding Iran being in non-compliance with resolution 2216 “fail to render an impartial and objective assessment of the issues at hand.” Khoshroo asserted that, “My Government re-emphasizes that it neither has a policy nor seeks to transfer arms or military equipment in Yemen or manufacture them therein.” On February 22, the UK circulated a revised resolution in which the wording on Iran was altered, stating that Iran was in “non-compliance” rather than in “violation” of UN resolution 2216. The following day Russia, China and Bolivia opposed this draft. The UK again revised the wording and circulated another new proposal, moderating the language such that it no longer condemned Iran for violating the sanctions regime. The new proposal also stipulated that the UNSC intended to address Iran’s violations, rather than saying that the UNSC was required to take action. On February 24, Russia then tabled its own resolution devoid of any UK additions regarding Iran. The proposed Russian resolution was effectively a routine extension of the sanctions measures until February 26, 2019, and the mandate of the Panel of Experts to March 28, 2019. The UK then tabled a further revision of its draft resolution, containing language that “expressed particular concern” regarding Iranian non-compliance with the arms embargo and making no mention of further UNSC action.
Speaking before the February 26 UNSC vote on the UK resolution, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that: “The wording advanced in the British draft is liable to have dangerous, destabilising ramifications, not only for Yemen but the region as a whole. This will inevitably escalate regional tensions and lead to conflict amongst key regional players.” In voting Russia, as a permanent UNSC member state, exercised its veto power; Bolivia also voted against the draft, China and Kazakhstan abstained, while the remaining eleven council members voted in favor. The UNSC then voted unanimously to adopt the Russian draft resolution (S/Red/2402), given that, with the failure of the UK draft, the Russian resolution was necessary for the sanctions committee and the Panel of Experts to continue operating for the upcoming year. The Russian veto was the first time that any UNSC permanent member state had exercised their veto power in relation to the Yemen conflict and the first time the council has been so publicly at odds regarding the war. There have been divisions among UNSC members in the past that stemmed from member states advancing and protecting the position of the Saudi-led military coalition intervening in the Yemen conflict, those highlighting the viewpoints of the coalition’s rivals in Yemen, and other member states that were primarily concerned with the humanitarian situation; however, prior to the February 26 vote, accommodations had been successfully made between member states to find mutually acceptable language in council texts adopted regarding Yemen. Following the vote, Ambassador Kelley Currie, Representative for Economic and Social Affairs for the US mission to the UN, said in her statement to the UNSC: “Russia’s veto today serves only to protect Iran’s efforts to destabilize the region and spread its malign influence… We will not stop until Tehran is stopped and peace is once more possible for the people of the Middle East.” Ambassador Currie followed up on this during the February 27 UNSC meeting on Yemen, stating that: “This Council must hold those violating sanctions – like Iran – accountable.” She also noted that “in addition to addressing Yemen’s humanitarian concerns however, we must also recognize the very real security concerns of Saudi Arabia.” On February 27, France, Germany, the UK, and the US then issued a joint statement saying: “We condemn Iran’s non-compliance, as described by the Panel, which poses serious risks to peace and stability in the region. We call upon Iran to immediately cease all activities that are inconsistent with or would violate the terms of Security Council resolution 2216.”
It should be noted that the Panel of Experts report is an expansive document, of which Iran’s non-compliance with the arms embargo made up only a portion. Among the other aspects of the report are its documentation of “widespread violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights by all parties to the conflict.” These include Saudi-led military coalition air strikes on civilians and civilian targets, as well as the “indiscriminate use of explosive ordnance by Houthi-Saleh forces.” The Panel stressed that it has “seen no evidence to suggest that appropriate measures were taken by any side to mitigate the devastating impact of these attacks on the civilian population.” It then called on all belligerent parties to “comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights law.” None of the UNSC draft resolutions tabled last month, nor any of the statements by UN member states following the adoption of the Russian draft, explicitly mentioned these other aspects of the the Panel of Experts report.
On February 9, the outgoing UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, stated that his successor would prepare a new round of UN-sponsored peace negotiations to take place in Oman; the Saudi-led military coalition subsequently stated its willingness to join these negotiations in support of the internationally recognized Government of Yemen. On February 16, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres officially appointed Martin Griffiths of the UK as the new UN Special Envoy for Yemen. Until his appointment Griffiths had been the executive director of the European Institute of Peace in Brussels. Previously, he was also a mediation adviser for UN envoys to Syria and deputy head of the UN Observer Mission there. On February 27, the outgoing Special Envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, gave his final 60-day briefing to the UNSC. In his statement to the council, Ould Cheikh Ahmed said: “Those who follow the Yemen file closely will acknowledge that the United Nations has spared no effort to help the Yemeni parties reach a peaceful solution.” The outgoing Special Envoy said he had been on the cusp of securing a peace agreement between the warring parties, “but they refused to sign in the last minute. In the end of the consultations, it became clear that the Houthis were not prepared to make concessions on the proposed security arrangements. This has been a major stumbling block towards reaching a negotiated solution.” At a press briefing following his UNSC briefing, Ould Cheikh Ahmed clarified that his statement regarding the Houthis was in reference to UN-led negotiations in Kuwait in 2016. Over the first two years of his tenure, 2015 and 2016, Ould Cheikh Ahmed presided over three rounds of failed UN-led peace negotiations and various ceasefire agreements that the warring parties broke almost immediately; in 2017 he was unable to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table at all. In December 2016, Ould Cheikh Ahmed put forward a peace proposal that Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi had immediately and outright rejected. In February 2017, a high-ranking Houthi official submitted a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres requesting that he not renew the Special Envoy’s term, claiming that Ould Cheikh Ahmed had shown a “lack of neutrality” and was biased toward the Saudi-led military coalition. In June 2017, Houthi senior leader Saleh Ali al-Samad declared that the Special Envoy was “not desirable for future peace negotiations,” and barred Ould Cheikh Ahmed from future entry into areas controlled by the Houthis and then-allied forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Tensions in the southern city of Aden appeared to subside somewhat through February, with a notable absence of armed conflict. This followed widespread violence there at the end of January between ostensible allies in the coalition of forces fighting on behalf of the country’s internationally recognized government; these clashes involved the Southern Transition Council (STC), a secessionist group backed by the United Arab Emirates, and troops loyal to Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi. After Abu Dhabi and Riyadh sent a military and security delegation to intervene and stop the fighting in early February, STC leader Aiderous al-Zubaidi visited frontlines against the Houthis in the north of al-Dhalea governorate, north of Aden. Al-Zubaidi’s move was widely interpreted as an attempt to allay concerns within the Saudi-led military coalition that conflict in Aden between the STC and Hadi troops had weakened the larger military efforts against the Houthis. The movements of Tariq Saleh, the nephew of the late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, continued to be fodder for speculation in Yemen through February after his public appearance in Shabwa governorate in January. According to Sana’a Center sources, the Saudi-led military coalition, and the UAE in particular, is looking to utilise Tariq as part of its anti-Houthi military strategy in north Yemen. Media reports from February reported that Saleh’s nephew had visited the Mokha district of Taiz governorate mid-month in order to assess the current state of anti-Houthi operations being conducted along Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. According to the same report, pro-Hadi, Salafi military commanders from the “Giants Brigade” stationed in western Taiz were reluctant to meet Tariq and opposed to his potential involvement in the Red Sea offensive. Throughout February, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) conducted a series of asymmetric attacks against multiple opponents that included Houthi fighters, members of the UAE-backed Security Belt forces, and counterterrorism officials. During the month of February, the UAE launched two separate anti-AQAP operations in Hadramawt and Shabwa governorates. The UAE first launched “Operation Faisal” on February 16, which saw the mobilisation of UAE-backed Hadramawt Elite Forces against AQAP militants in the al-Masini valley that is located approximately 100 km west of al-Mukalla, Hadramawt. The UAE then launched “Operation Decisive Sword” on February 26, which is being led by UAE-backed Shabwa Elite Forces and aims to clear Wadi Yeshbum of al-Said district, Shabwa, of AQAP militants.
On February 12, President Hadi replaced the Governor of the Central Bank of Yemen in Aden, Monasser al-Quaiti, with former finance Minister Mohammad Zammam. Sana’a Center sources indicate that the decision was largely undertaken in response to al-Quaiti’s inability to establish a fully functioning CBY headquarters in Aden in the face of continuing logistical and security challenges there. A meeting then took place between the new governor of the CBY and the head of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority to discuss the terms of the US$2 billion deposit Saudi Arabia made to the CBY in Aden in January. According to Sana’a Center sources, although the CBY in Aden had yet to sign the necessary agreement that would allow it to access the funds at to the time of this writing, such is likely to be formalized in March. In northern areas of Yemen under Houthi control, February saw cooking gas shortages and price hikes, sparking public protests. The crisis has been exacerbated by the Sana’a authorities’ significant taxation of cooking gas, as well as rising demand; due to high fuel prices, many vehicle owners have converted from fuel to gas combustion engines.
Through February the Yemeni rial (YR) continued to witness a steady depreciation, going from YR 458 to the US$ to more than YR 492 in market trading. However, following news of an impending agreement over the US$2 billion Saudi deposit, the YR appreciated again to approximately YR 480 at the time of writing. In late February the CBY in Aden began to distribute the new YR 1000 banknotes on the local market. These notes, like the YR 500 notes released in 2017, are of a different size to older Yemeni notes and their distribution and circulation has been quite political. In Houthi-controlled areas, the authorities have banned financial actors and the private sector from using the new banknotes, in an effort to reduce the value of the new bills to the Hadi government, which is attempting to use them to pay public sector salaries and increase liquidity. As such, many people in the north of the country are hesitant to trade with the new currency, limiting its distribution and effectiveness.
In his briefing to the UNSC on February 27, the Director of Operations and Advocacy at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, John Ging, expressed concern over recent humanitarian developments: “People’s lives have continued unravelling. Conflict has escalated significantly since November, driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes, according to UNHCR [UN High Commission for Refugees]. More people are going hungry, and famine remains a real threat. Although cholera cases are in decline, the disease is not yet beaten and is likely to rebound in the upcoming rainy season.” Ging described how humanitarian access within the country has deteriorated, notably in territories controlled by Houthi forces. Even though access into the country has improved since December 2017, when the coalition eased its blockade of Yemen’s Red Sea ports, Ging raised concerns over “the Coalition policy to divert containerized cargo to Aden” and the continued closure of Sana’a airport for commercial traffic. The number of vessels seeking clearances from the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism to enter Hudaydah and Saleef ports has halved since the blockade, given delays imposed on ships even after they have been issued clearances. “Vessels cleared by this mechanism should be able to proceed directly to port without additional delays,” said Ging. “For that to happen, Hudaydah and Saleef ports must remain open without time limits or other restrictions that may discourage commercial shipping companies from serving them.” Ging also called the full funding of the 2018 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan (YHRP), tallied at US$2.96 billion, a top priority. He stated that about one third of the YHRP had already been pledged by donors, notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (as part of the Yemen Comprehensive Humanitarian Operations initiative announced in January), and that Sweden and Switzerland would host a pledging conference in Geneva on April 3.
This report was prepared by Waleed Alhariri, Spencer Osberg, Alex J. Harper, Taima Al-Iriani, Victoria K. Sauer and Ali Abdullah. Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic, humanitarian, and human rights developments on the ground. This month’s report was developed with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
In January, widespread violence erupted in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden between ostensible allies in the coalition of forces fighting on behalf of the country’s internationally recognized government. On January 21, the Southern Transition Council (STC), a secessionist group back by the United Arab Emirates, issued an ultimatum to Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi to dismiss his prime minister and other cabinet members for alleged corruption. On January 28 the ultimatum expired and clashes broke out between the Presidential Protection Forces and STC-allied armed groups, with STC forces quickly routing Hadi-allied units from positions across the city and from nearby military bases.
In early 2017 the United Nations (UN) declared that Yemen was enduring the single largest humanitarian crisis in the world. By year’s end, UN agencies estimated that 17.8 million people in Yemen were food insecure and 8.4 million were at risk of famine. Economic and public service collapse left more than 16 million Yemenis without access to safe water and sanitation, and 16.4 million without proper healthcare. All of these factors played into an outbreak of cholera in 2017 that surpassed 1 million suspected cases by December – the largest cholera epidemic ever recorded in a single year. The UN’s 2017 humanitarian appeal for Yemen amounted US$2.3 billion, of which the international community had funded 70.5 percent by year’s end (see ‘Humanitarian Developments’ below for details).
In response to this crisis, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) held a combined nine briefing and consultation sessions related to Yemen in 2017, during which no new resolutions were adopted and one Presidential Statement – a council product less weighty than a resolution – was issued. Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who as United Nations Special Envoy to Yemen heads UN efforts to end the conflict that is driving the humanitarian crisis, initiated no new peace talks between the warring parties during this time.
While no party to the conflict appeared receptive to peace overtures in 2017, the Houthi leadership and then-allied forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh stated early in the year that they felt the Special Envoy was biased against them and could not be a fair peace arbiter. However, deterred neither by this nor by the numerous broken ceasefires and failed peace negotiations that the Special Envoy presided over in 2015 and 2016, in 2017 UN Secretary-General António Guterres and UNSC member states regularly reiterated their support for Ould Cheikh Ahmed and his efforts toward resolving the conflict.
UNSC member state representatives, UN officials, and diplomats speaking privately with the Sana’a Center in 2017 consistently noted the same primary causes of UNSC inaction regarding Yemen: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other partners in the regional military coalition intervening in the Yemen war – among them Egypt, which sat on the UNSC in 2017 – assertively pressured UNSC member states not to take actions the coalition deemed unfavorable, with other nations generally apprehensive about antagonizing Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The United States (US), United Kingdom (UK) and France – all veto-wielding permanent UNSC members, as well as the Saudi-led military coalition’s primary arms suppliers – have also quashed attempts at the UNSC to restrain the coalition or to implicate its members in war crimes. Representatives from other UNSC member states told the Sana’a Center in 2017 that the council had thus exhausted all plausible options for action regarding Yemen and had essentially been reduced to an observer of the crisis (see ‘At the United Nations’ below for details).
In the US, former President Barack Obama’s official exit from the White House in January 2017 marked the end of the outgoing administration’s last-ditch effort to end the Yemen war. It ushered in a new era of US belligerence regarding Yemen, and the world generally, under President Donald Trump. However, there are two pillars of the previous administration’s Yemen policy that Trump has not only upheld but in fact championed during his inaugural year in office. One is steadfast US support for the Saudi-led military coalition. Trump has shown renewed zeal for arms sales to US allies in the Gulf. The new US administration has also fully adopted – and spent considerable energy propagating – the Saudi narrative that the Houthis are Iran’s “proxy terrorist group” (see ‘In the United States’ below for details).
The second Obama-era policy continued by the Trump administration is a myopic focus on military firepower to counter al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) rather than programs addressing the socio-economic and political accelerants of extremism. This passing of the torch between presidents was epitomized just days after Trump entered the White House when he signed off on a US Navy SEAL raid – planned when Obama was still in office – against a suspected AQAP hideout in Yemen’s al-Bayda governorate. Casualties of the raid included 25 civilians – nine of them children under the age of 13 – and a US commando (see ‘AQAP, Daesh and Counterterrorism Operations’ below for details).
In other international diplomatic developments in 2017, the European Union (EU) and individual EU member states intensified their engagement with Yemen, from pursuing track II negotiations with Yemeni tribal leaders and supporting the humanitarian campaign to calling for an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and the Yemeni government abruptly severed diplomatic ties with Qatar in June, imposing travel and trade bans and expelling Doha from the Saudi-led military coalition. Moscow, meanwhile, continued to operate the last foreign diplomatic mission in Sana’a – other than the Iranian embassy – through most of 2017. This ended in December, however: the Russian embassy closed following the Houthi killing of former President Saleh (see ‘Other Regional and International Diplomatic Developments’ below for details).
In Yemen, both the conflict and humanitarian crisis dramatically escalated toward the end of the year. This began in early November when Houthi forces fired a ballistic missile towards Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. Saudi officials claimed the missile had been smuggled into Yemen from Iran. In response the Saudi-led military coalition ordered the closure of Yemen’s sea and air ports to all aid and commercial traffic. This sparked price surges and shortages of fuel and basic commodities across the country (see ‘Humanitarian Developments’ below for details).
Weeks later the conflict took another startling turn when the alliance between the Houthis and Saleh violently collapsed in late November, with the Houthis then killing Saleh in early December. Saleh was the most prominent Yemeni political figure of the last four decades; for years he weaved sprawling networks of power, patronage, influence and money across the country, around the region and throughout the world. The death of arguably the most connected and most corrupt man in Yemen is widely understood to have made a negotiated settlement to the conflict far harder to achieve.
Following Saleh’s death, the Houthis consolidated control in Sana’a and areas of the country’s north that they had co-managed with Saleh’s General People’s Congress party (GPC) since 2015. Saleh’s death precipitated the disintegration of the GPC, eliminating the Houthi’s primary competition in northern Yemen in the plunder of state revenue streams. The Houthis also carried out a targeted campaign of mass arrests and enforced oppressive new security measures throughout December. Key Saleh loyalists whom the Houthis were unable to arrest either went into hiding or fled to Marib and other areas controlled by the forces associated with Yemen’s internationally recognized government (see ‘Collapse of the Houthi-Saleh Alliance and Saleh’s Death’ below for details).
Throughout 2017 the authority of President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Yemeni government weakened in many areas across the country’s south that they purportedly controlled, even as forces nominally fighting on the government’s behalf made moderate battlefield gains at both the beginning and end of the year. Public protests over failing public services repeatedly erupted in Aden, the government’s de facto capital in southern Yemen. Hadi and his cabinet, who largely operated from Riyadh throughout 2017, were widely panned as corrupt and inept. Tensions between armed factions in the city – primarily Yemeni government-affiliated troops and various UAE-backed local forces – also regularly erupted in clashes. This, coupled with several spectacularly violent terrorist attacks, produced in Aden a profound sense of insecurity.
Further undermining the Hadi government were various new political and military actors whose influence expanded across southern Yemen in 2017. The Southern Transitional Council (STC), for instance, formed in May with the explicit goal of seceding South Yemen from the greater Yemeni republic; by December the STC had representative offices across the south. In attempts to quash the council, President Hadi had sacked seven governors for their association with the STC by year’s end. Importantly, the UAE – ostensibly a Hadi ally through its participation in the Saudi-led military coalition – actively supported the STC. Abu Dhabi’s other interventions have included funding, training and arming local paramilitary groups that increasingly challenged Yemeni government troops for dominance in several southern governorates as well as the northern governorate of Taiz. Meanwhile, relatively successful models of self-governance in Marib and Hadramawt last year empowered local political leaders to demand that the Yemeni government officially sanction their increased autonomy (see ‘Fragmentation Amongst Anti-Houthi Forces’ below for details).
In frontline developments, coalition-backed forces launched “Operation Golden Spear” in January 2017, advancing northward along Yemen’s western Red Sea coastline to seize Mokha port in Taiz governorate from Houthi-Saleh forces. Further progress stalled, however, with frontlines around the country remaining essentially static for most of the rest of the year; until December the only notable coalition achievement was the capture of Khalid bin al-Walid military base in Taiz governorate after a prolonged siege. Following Saleh’s death in December, however, coalition forces moved north of Mokha to seize Khokha district in Hudaydah governorate, while also gaining territory in Shabwa, al-Bayda and al-Jawf governorates. These territorial losses for the Houthis at the end of 2017 were significant only in so far as they constituted frontline movements after prolonged stalemate. In the overall military dynamics of the Yemen war, a decisive military victory for any side remained a remote possibility as 2018 began (see ‘Frontline Developments’ below for details).
Among the most significant military developments of 2017 was the preemption of a Saudi-led military coalition assault on the Houthi-held Red Sea port of Hudaydah. Throughout the first quarter of 2017 Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied their allies in Washington, D.C., to approve direct US military support for a coalition assault on Hudaydah. The coalition has long claimed that Iranian weapons are being smuggled to Houthi forces through Hudaydah port – a claim widely disputed by UN agencies. Critics of the proposed assault pointed to how it would dramatically exacerbate Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, given that Yemen imports nearly all its food supplies and that the vast majority of these supplies – both commercial and humanitarian – arrive through Hudaydah port.
The possibility of an attack on the port thus dominated foreign policy discussions regarding Yemen in the US, at the UN and throughout much of the international community in March and April. However, by late April, intense opposition within the US Congress, at the UNSC, and throughout the international humanitarian community appeared to prevail: the US administration took a tentative stance regarding the attack and the Saudi-led military coalition eased off the rush to launch it (see ‘Operation Golden Spear and Hudaydah Port’ below for details).
A consistent aspect of the conflict since the beginning has been the lack of respect for the laws of war. As stated by a UN Panel of Experts report in January 2017, all the belligerent parties have carried out “widespread violations” of international humanitarian and human rights law. This trend continued through 2017. Houthi-Saleh forces, Yemeni government troops, the Saudi-led military coalition and affiliated ground forces, as well as various non-state actors regularly attacked civilians and civilian objects, launched indiscriminate attacks, carried out arbitrary detainments and torture, used banned weapons, impeded humanitarian aid and access, starved civilian populations, and carried out forced displacements, among other violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
A significant development regarding accountability in 2017 was the UN’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report including Saudi Arabia on its list of actors guilty of grave violations against the rights of children. This listing was based upon Riyadh’s conduct during the Yemen war. Saudi Arabia had initially been named to the list in 2016, but was removed after threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for UN aid programs. While Houthi-Saleh forces, Yemeni government troops, coalition-backed militias and AQAP were all again named to this year’s report, Saudi Arabia was included in an amended category that recognized its attempts to address issues the report raises. Another accountability development came in September when the UN Human Rights Council approved a resolution to establish of a group of experts to investigate human rights violations by all parties (see ‘Human Rights and War Crimes’ for details below).
Yemen’s economy continued to contract through 2017. The Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation reported that Yemen’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank 14.4 percent year-on-year, signifying a 40.5 percent loss in GDP since 2015. The value of Yemen’s domestic currency, the rial, was consequently battered: in January 2017 the average market exchange rate for the Yemeni rial (YR) against the US dollar was YR 321 to US$1, according to Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) figures; as December ended, the rial was trading in the range of YR 460 to US$1. Relative to March 2015, when the conflict began and the rial was trading at YR 215 to US$1, the cost of purchasing dollars on the market had increased 114 percent (see ‘Economic Developments’ below for details).
Given that Yemen imports up to 90 percent of its basic foodstuffs this currency depreciation has decimated local per capita purchasing power. The inability to purchase available food – rather than the unavailability of food to purchase – is driving the country toward mass famine. This negative trend has been further compounded by the widespread loss of livelihood and paid employment. As 2017 ended, most of Yemen’s 1.2 million civil servants had received only a fraction of their salaries since September 2016. Meanwhile the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in December that commercial businesses had, on average, cut operating hours by half since the conflict began, with layoffs estimated at 55 percent of the workforce.
In 2017 the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) held nine briefings and consultations on the situation in Yemen. Besides a routine measure renewing the sanctions regime (resolution S/RES/2342 (2017)), it passed no new resolutions regarding the country. In June, however, the UNSC adopted Presidential Statement S/PRST/2017/7 – the first Security Council product related to Yemen to emerge in 14 months. Importantly, a Presidential Statement holds less weight than a UNSC resolution, while this particular Presidential Statement also lacked language mandating enforcement.
Speaking to the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, UNSC member states and Security Council observers said the council’s prolonged silence regarding Yemen – site of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis – had become untenable. As the situation in Yemen continued to deteriorate, lobbying intensified by non-governmental organizations, United Nation (UN) agencies, and some UNSC member states.
While the United Kingdom (UK), as council pen-holder for Yemen, was ultimately responsible for drafting the presidential statement, the process of shaping the language and content of the text elicited ministerial-level involvement from various UNSC member states. Among other deliberations and negotiations in drafting the wide-ranging document, the Swedish delegation lobbied for the inclusion of the clauses insisting that the warring parties distinguish between military and civilian targets; the Italian mission pushed for language regarding allowing humanitarian access through Hudaydah port; the Russian delegation forced language to be cut from the document that condemned the Houthis for not meeting with the Special Envoy while he had been in Sana’a in May; and the Egyptian mission attempted to scrap language specifically referring to the installation of cranes at Hudaydah port and the opening of Sana’a Airport to commercial flights, though in the end they accepted the inclusion of language referring to the cranes (see ‘Humanitarian Developments’ for details below). UNSC member states also told the Sana’a Center that Saudi officials, including the foreign minister, heavily scrutinized and weighed in on the language of the statement through the Egyptian mission to the UNSC.
Even before it was adopted, the feasibility of various aspects of the presidential statement was in doubt. For instance, in the presidential statement the UNSC reiterated its continued support for the efforts of UN Special Envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed to broker peace, and it called on the warring parties to engage with the Special Envoy’s proposals. This came, however, just 10 days after one of the most senior Houthi officials in Sana’a had condemned Ould Cheikh Ahmed and banned him from ever returning to Yemen (see ‘The UN Special Envoy for Yemen and the Peace Process’ below for details). In addition, within two days of the presidential statement calling for the warring parties to distinguish between military and civilian targets, the Saudi-led coalition, for the second time in 2017, bombed a market in northern Yemen, killing 23 civilians (see ‘Human Rights and War Crimes’ below for details).
The UNSC last adopted a new resolution regarding Yemen in April 2015: UNSC Resolution 2216, which the Saudi-led military coalition has since used to legitimize its intervention in the conflict. Security Council members expect no new resolutions regarding Yemen in the near future. Throughout 2017 three permanent members, namely the United States (US), UK, and France, continued to back the coalition through arms sales worth billions of US dollars. The US also continued to provide technical, intelligence, and air refuel support to the Saudi-led military coalition.
While several non-permanent UNSC member states have at different times expressed an interest in proposing new resolutions and pursuing more assertive council actions regarding Yemen, these efforts have all been derailed. The veto-wielding US and UK missions to the UNSC have consistently blocked proposals that would restrain the Saudi-led military coalition; Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have lobbied assertively and effectively for the same, and acted by proxy at the UNSC through the Egyptian mission. Egypt’s rotating term on the council ended, however, in December 2017. Going forward Kuwait, which took up a council seat in January 2018, is expected to champion the coalition position. Like Egypt, Kuwait is a coalition member.
Throughout 2017 the Russia representative to the UNSC has appeared somewhat at odds with the positions staked out by the US, UK, and France. Russia has arguably remained a neutral party throughout the Yemen conflict, maintaining open lines of communication with all parties to the conflict (see ‘Other Regional and International Developments’ below for details). Russia is the only UNSC member to have abstained during the 2015 vote on UNSC Resolution 2216, which the Russian mission described as “imbalanced” and lacking the stipulation for ceasefire requested by Moscow. At various times throughout 2017 Russia spotlighted the Houthi perspective during UNSC discussions, arguing that the council ought to take a more considered approach.
In December 2017, rotating UNSC membership ended for six countries: Egypt, Italy, Japan, Senegal, Ukraine, and Uruguay. Six new members joined the council: Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Kuwait, Netherlands, Peru, and Poland. Having chaired the 2140 Yemen Sanctions Committee for the previous two years, Japan handed the chairmanship to Peru.
In 2017 Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed entered his third year as United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, leading the UN’s efforts to bring about a negotiated end to the conflict. Throughout 2015 and 2016 the Special Envoy had presided over several rounds of unsuccessful peace talks and ceasefires that failed within days; in 2017 he was unable to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table at all.
In December 2016 Ould Cheikh Ahmed had put forward a peace proposal that Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi had immediately and outright rejected. The next month Ould Cheikh Ahmed had entered a period of shuttle diplomacy around Middle Eastern capitals in an attempt to garner support for that same proposal, but to no greater success. As reported by the UN 2140 Sanctions Committee Panel of Experts at the end of that month, no side in the conflict had “demonstrated sustained interest in or commitment to a political settlement or peace talks.” Forces affiliated with the Yemeni government and the Saudi-led military coalition backing it sought to capitalize on battlefield gains early in 2017 (see ‘Operation Golden Spear and Hudaydah Port’ below for details). This, coupled with the a new and far more belligerent White House administration backing the coalition (see ‘In the United States’ below for details), heavily disincentivized the Hadi government and coalition member states from genuinely engaging with the Special Envoy.
On the other side of the conflict, the Houthis and then-allied forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh made it clear early in 2017 that they no longer trusted Ould Cheikh Ahmed to be a fair arbitrator. In February a high-ranking Houthi official submitted a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres requesting that he not renew the Special Envoy’s term, claiming that Ould Cheikh Ahmed had shown a “lack of neutrality” and was biased toward the Saudi-led coalition.
In May the Special Envoy went on a three-day visit to Sana’a to discuss his plan to avert a possible coalition attack on the Red Sea port of Hudaydah (see ‘Operation Golden Spear and Hudaydah Port’ below for details). This proposal involved Houthi-Saleh forces turning port management over to third-party security and financial committees. However, no senior leadership from either the Houthis or the Saleh-allied General People’s Congress (GPC) party agreed to meet with Ould Cheikh Ahmed. The Special Envoy would also later describe in a UNSC briefing that his convoy was attacked and an assassination attempt made against him on the same trip.
The following month, Saleh Ali al-Samad, the President of the Houthi-Saleh Supreme Political Council, declared that the Special Envoy was “not desirable for future peace negotiations,” and barred Ould Cheikh Ahmed from future entry into Houthi-Saleh controlled areas.
At various times throughout the rest of 2017 the Special Envoy met with officials from the US, Europe, and the Gulf. He gave briefings to both the UNSC and the so-called Quint – a multilateral group of foreign ministers from the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. Ould Cheikh Ahmed generally used his public speaking events to highlight the plight of Yemenis, the need for the international community to respond, the inability of any side to win a decisive military victory, and the lack of progress toward a negotiated settlement to the war. Throughout, the UNSC and UN Secretary General regularly reiterated their support for the Special Envoy’s efforts.
Timeline
The end of the administration of US President Barack Obama in January 2017 marked the collapse of a last-ditch peace push by outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry. The collapse of this effort foreshadowed the wider withdrawal of the US from the peace process in Yemen in 2017 – and, under the new administration of President Donald Trump, a more belligerent stance in the world generally. During private conversations with UNSC member state representatives and other UN sources in March 2017, the Sana’a Center found that the new US administration was generally expected to erase any diplomatic detente engendered by Yemen peace negotiations since 2015. UNSC member states also foresaw the new Trump White House embracing the Saudi and Emirati narrative that the Houthis are Iranian proxies, akin to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Yemen’s internationally recognized government had a similar assessment, welcoming the new US president and the prospect of increased US military support, while in parallel, Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi showed decreased interest in engaging with the UN Special Envoy in the peace process.
While abandoning one aspect of the Obama administration’s Yemen policy – peace arbitration – Trump has doubled down on two other strategies pursued by the previous president: stalwart support for the Saudi-led military coalition and a myopic focus on military firepower in countering al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), rather than addressing the socio-economic and political accelerants of extremism.
Just days after coming into office, Trump approved a US Navy SEAL raid in Yemen’s al-Bayda governorate. Death tolls from the scene varied slightly; however, villagers report 25 civilians killed, including 9 children under the age of 13. AQAP reported 14 members killed, while the US Navy reported that one commando was killed, four were wounded, and a $70 million US Navy Osprey aircraft was destroyed. The White House press secretary dubbed the event a “successful operation by all standards.” This – and at least six drone strikes in Yemen authorized by Trump during his first 10 days in office – portended a surge in US military activity in Yemen for the year ahead (see the ‘AQAP, Daesh and counterterrorism operations’ section below for details).
Also among Trump’s first acts after taking office was an executive order entitled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” – the so-called Muslim ban – prohibiting people from seven Muslim-majority countries, Yemen among them, from entering the US.
Trump’s burgeoning relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE has increasingly guided and framed his administration’s actions regarding Yemen. Packed with hardliners deeply anxious over the growth of Iran’s influence in the region, his cabinet was the first US administration to label the Houthis officially one of Iran’s “proxy terrorists groups.” A year that saw the Trump administration increasing portray the Houthis as an extension of Iranian power was capped, in December, with US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley staging a media event at a military base in Washington, D.C.. There she displayed reconstructed missiles which she claimed the Houthis had fired into Saudi Arabia. Haley said Iran had smuggled these, among other weapons on display, into Yemen and thus were evidence of how Tehran was “fanning the flames” of Middle East conflict.
That said, the Trump administration has not been fully in lockstep with the Saudi-led military coalition this past year. The US administration declined the coalition’s requests for direct US military support in launching an offensive against Hudaydah port (see the ‘Operation Golden Spear and Hudaydah Port’ section below for details). In a rare admonishment of the coalition’s blockade of North Yemen, the White House released a statement on December 6, 2017 calling on Riyadh to “completely allow food, fuel, water, and medicine to reach the Yemeni people who desperately need it.”
In addition, Democratic and Republican legislators increasingly pushed back against the administration’s involvement in the Yemen war. Bipartisan groups proposed multiple pieces of legislation throughout 2017 to curtail or end US support for Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. These legislative efforts included resolution HR 81, which gained 40 congressional cosponsors by the end of October. However, leaders from both political parties introduced amendments watering down the text: while the original bill would have quickly ended US military support for the coalition, the final version instead called for “U.S. support for the Saudi-led Arab coalition’s commitments to abide by their no-strike list and restricted target list and improve targeting capabilities.”
Timeline
In 2017 the European Union took advantage of its comparatively neutral position in the conflict in Yemen to continue to build its profile, with EU diplomatic officials visiting Sana’a in August to meet with Houthi leaders and former President Saleh – something that the UN Special Envoy himself had been unable to do earlier in the year. The European Parliament then passed a resolution (2017/2849(RSP)) calling for a negotiated end to the Yemen conflict and the enforcement of another EU resolution from February 2016. This previous resolution called for an arms embargo on Riyadh “given the serious allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”
Many EU member states have also increased their Yemen-related activities. Both publicly and behind the scenes, Paris has increased its engagements with Yemen, with French government officials close to President Emmanuel Macron telling the Sana’a Center that these moves reflect the president’s personal policy agenda. Visiting the region in April, German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE a more active German role in the peace process, while also calling for an end to coalition airstrikes in Yemen. Sweden and the Netherlands took increasingly activist stances, helping to pave the way for the UN Human Rights Commission’s call for an independent inquiry into human rights violations this year. Sweden and Switzerland also co-hosted with the UN the “High-Level Pledging Event for the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen” in Geneva in April 2017, which raised US$1.1 billion for humanitarian assistance (see ‘Humanitarian Developments’ for details below). Despite being perceived as somewhat in retreat from the international stage following the Brexit vote, the UK – as has historically been the case – has continued its engagement with the Yemen file, notably through the so-called “Quintet” – composed of the US, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt abruptly severed diplomatic ties with Qatar in June and imposed travel and trade bans. Unsurprisingly, this affected Yemen, as Doha was simultaneously expelled from the Saudi-led military coalition. The Qatari government had previously played a small but significant role in the coalition, sending troops and hosting events such as donor conferences. The Yemeni government also cut diplomatic ties with Qatar. This sparked divided reactions from the Islah party, which has had close ties to Qatar. That said, Islah’s leadership officially distancing themselves from both Qatar and the “international Muslim Brotherhood” paved the way for a tentative reconciliation with key coalition members, including the UAE.
Moscow also continued to exercise behind-the-scenes influence and diplomacy in 2017. For instance, in October the Saudi-led military coalition agreed to suspend its air blockade of the Sana’a airport to allow a flight carrying Russian surgeons to land, with these doctors coming to perform cataract surgery on Saleh. Much of this was facilitated through the continued Russian diplomatic presence in Sana’a, with Moscow being the only foreign power besides Tehran to maintain its embassy in the Yemeni capital throughout the conflict. Circumstances changed following Saleh’s death in December, however. According to Sana’a Center sources, members of Saleh’s GPC party fleeing the Houthis had sought refuge at the Russian embassy. The Houthis responded by threatening to storm the building. Moscow promptly closed its diplomatic mission in Sana’a and evacuated its staff.
Timeline
In January 2017, then-UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien said Yemen had become the single largest food security emergency in the world and warned of the likelihood of famine in 2017. Shortly after, the UN and humanitarian partners launched the largest ever international humanitarian appeal for Yemen of US$2.1 billion. This amount was later increased to US$2.3 billion in response to the cholera epidemic. By mid-December 2017 the international community had provided 70.5 percent of the US$2.3 billion appeal.
According to the FAO, 2017 ended with 17.8 million Yemenis being food insecure, an increase of 800,000 people since the first quarter of the year. (Importantly, in the spring of 2017, UN agencies updated their method for calculating populations experiencing food insecurity. This led to an apparent month-to-month decrease in the number of food insecure individuals; UN officials, however, pointed out this was a one-off circumstance that did not correlate to actual improved food security on the ground.) December 2017 saw 8.4 million Yemenis at risk of famine, a 24 percent increase relative to March.
According to the OCHA Humanitarian Needs Overview 2018, there was a 15 percent increase in the number of Yemenis in acute need of humanitarian assistance to survive in the last five months of the 2017, with their number reaching 11.3 million people. At year’s end, 16 million Yemenis had difficulty accessing safe water and sanitation, while 16.4 million lacked access to proper healthcare.
A cholera outbreak erupted in Yemen at the end of April 2017. This outbreak represented a second, much more virulent, wave of cholera following the first outbreak in October 2016. The first outbreak, though it had resulted in 24,000 suspected cases of cholera/acute watery diarrhea (AWD) over the intervening months, had been showing a steadily declining incidence prior to April 2017. Between the end of April and mid-May last year, however, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded some 23,500 new suspected cases of cholera/AWD, with 242 associated deaths. As of 2 June, 2017, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was reporting almost 70,000 suspected cases of cholera/AWD and 600 deaths. A UNICEF official stated at the time that the number of cases in Yemen could rise to as much as 300,000 “within a few weeks’ time.” By December, the number of people estimated to have contracted cholera had surpassed 1 million, with more than 2,200 deaths.
The cholera epidemic is the result of several factors. One is the breakdown of Yemen’s public health system due to the nonpayment of public sector salaries and a lack of operating funds. Another is the weakened immunities of those experiencing extended periods of malnutrition. Finally, public infrastructure is dysfunctional, with key water and sewage systems failing. Due to a lack of funds and high fuel prices, pumping stations have ceased operations; this in turn has forced many Yemenis to rely on unsanitary water sources, particularly locally drilled bore wells.
As UN officials and humanitarian actors have repeatedly noted, the Saudi-led military coalition blockade of northern Yemen – which intensified substantially on November 6, 2017 – is a primary factor underlying the humanitarian crisis. The blockade has devastated the economy, causing mass loss of public services and livelihoods, price surges, and currency depreciation (see ‘Economic Developments’ for details below). All of these have undermined per capita purchasing power and the population’s ability to afford basic commodities such as food and medicine.
At the same time, although the country’s health sector is devastated, Yemenis cannot seek medical assistance abroad. In particular, the coalition’s forced closure of Sana’a International Airport to commercial flights since August 9, 2016, has prevented thousands from seeking medical care outside the country, “killing more people than airstrikes,” according to an August 2017 Norwegian Refugee Council report.
The ongoing conflict has also displaced more than three million people from their homes — approximately 11% of the total Yemeni population. Although roughly a third of those displaced have returned, two million Yemenis remain unable to return home. Prolonged exposure to armed conflict and violence has traumatized the population, leading to serious mental health concerns (for a more detailed overview of the long-term psychological effects of the conflict, see ‘The Impact of War on Mental Health in Yemen’, a joint report by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, and the Mailman School of Public Health).
Compounding the humanitarian crisis, aid organizations attempting to respond to the crisis in 2017 faced obstacles, interference, and harassment to their operations by a range of parties to the conflict. Saudi-led military coalition forces repeatedly delayed ships carrying humanitarian cargo to Hudaydah port, even after being issued clearances by the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism for Yemen. Beyond delaying humanitarian aid, the coalition’s air and naval blockade has also disrupted the commercial import food, fuel, and medical supplies.
Coalition airstrikes in August 2015 also damaged cranes at Hudaydah port, forcing the port to operate at a reduced offloading capacity. In January 2017 the WFP attempted to deliver four new cranes – paid for by the US government – to Hudaydah to replace those damaged. The coalition, however, revoked the shipment’s entry permit, and the cranes were redirected to a storage facility in Dubai. In December the coalition announced it would allow the delivery of the cranes, and in mid-January 2018 the cranes were offloaded in Hudaydah.
In September 2017, Human Rights Watch reported that Houthi-Saleh forces had also been “blocking and confiscating aid,” and had “denied access to populations in need, and restricted the movement of ill civilians and aid workers.”
Timeline
According to Yemen’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, Yemen’s gross domestic product contracted 14.4 percent in 2017. This, following an economic contraction of 15.3 percent in 2016 and 17.6 percent in 2015, amounts to a 40.5 percent loss in economic activity since the start of the conflict.
In January 2017 the average market exchange rate for the Yemeni rial (YR) versus the US dollar was YR 321 to US$1, according to Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) figures. By December 2017 the average market price was YR 453 to US$1 – a change of 41 percent relative to the start of the year. As December ended, the rial was trading in the range of YR 460 to $1. For perspective, Yemen’s domestic currency was trading at YR 215 to US$1 at the start of the conflict, meaning that the number of rials it took to purchase a single US dollar increased 114 percent between March 2015 and the end of 2017. Currency stability was a critical issue for Yemen in 2017, given the country’s overwhelming dependence on imports to meet the population’s nutritional needs – prior to the conflict, the country imported 90 percent of its basic foodstuffs.
Factors that continued to weigh on the rial in 2017 were the widespread collapse of economic activity and government services; widespread insecurity and worsening humanitarian conditions; the cessation of oil exports (previously the largest source of foreign currency and government revenue); and the decreasing ability of the Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) to intervene in the market, given its depleted foreign currency holdings. President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s 2016 decision to move the CBY headquarters from Sana’a to Aden, and the CBY’s subsequent dysfunction, also continued to complicate the country’s fiscal and monetary management through 2017.
Several factors mitigated the downward pressure on the rial: foreign remittances from Yemenis working abroad constituted the largest source of new foreign currency following the cessation of oil exports; international humanitarian aid funds continued throughout 2017; and regional parties to the conflict also contributed to currency inflows. These inflows, however, were not enough to halt the rial’s general decline in value through 2017. Yemen’s domestic currency also experienced periods of dramatic instability, one in early February and another that began in October and intensified through until the end of the year. (For details on the causes and ramifications of Yemen’s currency instability, see the Sana’a Center Economic Bulletins from March, September and October.) As documented by the Sana’a Center, authorities on both sides of the conflict have made significant efforts to combat currency instability and decline. However, these actions have been primarily stopgap measures and have been unable to address the fundamental issues causing the decline in currency.
President Hadi claimed in early 2017 that Saudi authorities had promised to make a $2 billion deposit into the CBY in Aden to shore up its nearly exhausted foreign currency reserves. As 2017 ended, this deposit had yet to arrive; however, in early December a Sana’a Center financial source stated that the Saudi transfer was likely to take place in early 2018.
Throughout 2017, many Yemeni public sector workers, particularly those in healthcare and education, suffered from the non- or partial payment of their wages (for details on the challenges facing the CBY and the non-payment of public sector wages, see the Sana’a Center report on Yemen Without a Functioning Central Bank). The inability to pay wages has been exacerbated by a continuing cash liquidity crisis and the decline of government revenues. The use of newly printed rials by the Yemeni government to pay public sector wages has been a source of controversy, largely due to fears that disbursing currency unsupported by increased economic activity or a replenishment in CBY’s foreign reserves would exacerbate inflationary pressures.
When salaries were in fact paid in 2017, it was on an ad hoc, irregular basis. In areas nominally controlled by the internationally recognized Yemeni government, the payment of salaries was hampered by the security and administrative challenges facing the Aden CBY. In Taiz, for example, the Hadi government only ensured a delivery of salaries to the governorate after the governor resigned in protest.
In northern Yemen – where the majority of the population and roughly 1 million of the country’s 1.2 million public sector workers are based – the Houthi-Saleh authorities continued to face a cash liquidity crisis. In the first half of the year, a commodity voucher system was deployed as an alternative payment measure. Inherently flawed and only ever partially implemented, the voucher system was largely discontinued months later (for more details on the voucher system, see the Sana’a Center April 2017 Review). Given that public sector workers were generally the breadwinners in their household, an estimated 7 million people continue to be impacted by the non-payment of public sector salaries in 2017, exacerbating the country’s food security crisis.
Regarding private sector losses, commercial businesses have on average cut operating hours by half since the conflict began, with layoffs estimated at 55 percent of the workforce. This shift has been spurred by surging costs, due to insecurity and shortages of inputs, and falling demand for goods and services, with public purchasing power tumbling on the back of widespread livelihood loss and domestic currency depreciation.
Some 1.5 million Yemenis registered with the country’s Social Welfare Fund (SWF) had been without support since the fund ceased operations in December 2014. Last year, however, the World Bank supplied UNICEF and the United Nations Development Program with $400 million to restart the SWF. The first $50 million distribution of cash occuring in August in partnership with the local al-Amal Microfinance Bank. The program is intended to initiate cash-for-work programs and reach 1.5 million beneficiaries in six Yemeni governorates.
Importantly, the CBY in Aden issued a circular a week before the restarting of SWF cash distributions, stating that the central bank will float the value of the rial, with the official exchange rate to be set according to the market rate. Sana’a Center sources say the move came after pressure from the World Bank. The floating currency is to prevent those Yemeni banks that exchange money for foreign aid organizations from using currency arbitrage to profit at the expense of intended aid recipients. For instance, at the end of July 2017, the market exchange rate was YR 367 to US$1, while aid organizations were exchanging foreign funds at the official rate of YR 250 to US$1. (For details, please see the Sana’a Center publication ‘Yemen Economic Bulletin: How currency arbitrage has reduced the funds available to address the humanitarian crisis’, September 6, 2017.)
Timeline
Among the most significant events of 2017 in Yemen was the collapse of the Houthi-Saleh alliance and the killing of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh at the hands of the Houthi fighters in early December. Saleh was the most prominent Yemeni political figure of the last four decades, and his death is widely seen to have made it far more difficult to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The General People’s Congress (GPC) party – which Saleh had founded and headed – also began to fracture in his absence.
Tensions within the Houthi-Saleh alliance had existed throughout the conflict. However, these tensions increased throughout 2017 as internal competition emerged over government positions and as the Houthi leadership challenged Saleh’s entrenched patronage networks for access to public revenues. As 2017 progressed, the Houthi leadership also became more suspicious of Saleh’s intentions, not least due to the former president’s repeated calls for dialogue with Saudi Arabia.
These tensions were apparent in August, when Saleh’s GPC staged a large rally in Sana’a to mark the party’s 35th anniversary and to demonstrate his popular support. Later in the month, armed clashes broke out between fighters on both sides and resulted in three deaths. Tensions and competitive grandstanding continued through September, notably over ministerial portfolios. The Houthis held demonstrations to celebrate the anniversary of their September 2014 takeover of the capital. On October 19 Houthi and GPC leaders again traded public allegations, with the GPC accusing the Houthis of conducting an “orchestrated campaign” against Saleh, and the Houthis claiming that the GPC was accepting money from the Hadi government.
These tensions escalated significantly in late November, and by the beginning of December had burst into widespread battles in the streets of Sana’a. On December 2, Saleh made a televised speech calling on Yemenis to rise up against the Houthis, as well as declaring his readiness to turn a “new page” with the Saudi-led military coalition. Saleh-allied forces initially appeared to gain the upper hand, though were quickly routed by Houthi fighters. On December 4 Houthi fighters posted a video online of the former president’s bullet-ridden body being hoisted into the back of a pickup truck. (For more on the implications of Saleh’s death, see recent analysis by the Sana’a Center on Yemen After Saleh). The Saudi-led military coalition subsequently began heavy bombardment of Sana’a, with the International Committee of the Red Cross reporting on December 5 that more than 230 people had been killed and 400 wounded in the capital during the violence.
While the Houthis have since consolidated political and military control over the areas of northern Yemen that they had previously co-managed with the GPC, a number of key Saleh loyalists – most notably, military leader Fadl al-Qawsi – have broken with the Houthis and fled to Marib and other areas under the control of coalition forces.
Timeline
Yemen has witnessed increasing socio-political fragmentation since the beginning of the conflict – a trend that continued through 2017. Among the most prominent fault lines that emerged were those between various groups and armed factions affiliated with the internationally recognized Yemeni government and local forces and political figures backed by the UAE. This became apparent in February when a dispute over unpaid wages for soldiers guarding the Aden airport spilled into armed clashes between the Presidential Guard, headed by Hadi’s son Nasser, and two armed groups affiliated with the UAE. The violence climaxed with an Emirati helicopter gunship opening fire on a Presidential Guard vehicle, killing multiple soldiers. Shortly after, Hadi and Emirati officials met in Riyadh to try and smooth tensions.
April saw more clashes between the UAE-backed Hezam al-Amni, or “Security Belt” forces – at the time headed by the prominent UAE-allied Salafi leader Hani bin Brayk – and Presidential Guard units. At the beginning of the month the two fought for control over the strategic Al-Alam checkpoint in eastern Aden. At the end of April, UAE-allied forces controlling the airport and the Presidential Guard were then involved in another armed standoff, again erupting into clashes in May. Similar violent incidents and insecurity remained constant features of life in Aden through the rest of 2017, accompanied by sporadic and spectacularly violent terrorist attacks (see ‘AQAP, Daesh and Counterterrorism Operations’ for details below).
At the end of April, Hadi sacked UAE-allied Aiderous al-Zubaidi from his position as governor of Aden and Hani bin Brayk, who aside from heading the Security Belt forces was also a minister of state. These events sparked escalating public protests that culminated in al-Zubaidi announcing the formation of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) on May 11. Supported by the Southern Movement coalition, the STC was to be made up of 26 southern Yemeni political, military and tribal leaders. Later in May, thousands of supporters of the STC gathered in Aden’s Khormaksar district calling for an independent South Yemen.
Tensions were heightened on June 28, when President Hadi issued a decree sacking the governors of Hadramawt, Socotra and Shabwa. All three governors were members of the STC, and Hadi justified the move as retaliation for their support for the secessionist movement. By the end of 2017, Hadi’s efforts to purge officials sympathetic to the STC had resulted in him sacking the governors of Lahj, al-Dhale, Soqotra, Hadramawt, Aden, Abyan and Shabwa.
In October, the STC staged demonstrations in Aden during which al-Zubaidi, now president of the STC, announced the establishment of a 303-seat “Southern National Assembly” (SNA) and an upcoming independence referendum to be held on an unspecified date. By late 2017, the STC had named the 303 members of its new governing body and appointed local STC leaders for each southern Yemeni governorate.
In addition to general insecurity in Aden, Southern Movement organizers have also capitalized on popular dissatisfaction with the Hadi government related to Aden’s failing public services. On October 30, for example, protesters blocked roads in the southern coastal city with burning tires. They expressed anger at the constant power outages and fuel and water shortages, which had left hospitals in the city warning they could be forced to shut down due to lack of electricity. On November 16, Abdulaziz al-Muflihi, the new governor of Aden, resigned after months of complaining that he was being inhibited from carrying out the functions of his office.
During the final months of the year the rivalry between the Islah party – a major supporter of President Hadi – and the Southern Movement then escalated, with attacks and assassinations targeting members of both sides. In late December, bin Brayk, now STC vice-president, publicly blamed Islah for the lack of successful military advances towards Sana’a.
Hadramawt witnessed its own momentum for increasing autonomy during 2017. In April, the Hadramawt Inclusive Conference was staged in Mukalla city, where stakeholders and power brokers exclusively from Hadramawt emphasized the centrality of their Hadrami identity over their Yemeni one. At the conference, participants made public statements regarding the need for the governorate to assert control over its security institutions, governance, and natural resources such as oil and gas. Various speakers referred to “50 years of oppression” – covering the period both after Hadramawt had joined South Yemen (1967), and after the unification of North and South Yemen (1990). This implied a rejection not only of central government rule from Sana’a and President Hadi’s project for a unified Yemen, but also of the Southern Movement’s goal to establish a unified, independent South Yemen including Hadramawt.
The UAE has played patron to Hadrami ambitions for greater independence, helping to create, train, and arm the Hadrami Elite Forces. These have acted with increasing autonomy from the Hadi government, asserting their lead in operations against AQAP and demanding that government troops hand over control of various checkpoints across Hadramawt. Similar UAE-backed security forces have been set up in Shabwa, and, more recently, Mahra. The increasing desire for autonomy in Hadramawt was seen by observers as being a central reason why the governorate was given a disproportionately large number of seats in the SNA (for more on the SNA, see the Sana’a Center’s November edition of Yemen at the UN).
Timeline
From July 2015, when the Saudi-led military coalition backed southern Yemeni forces in pushing Houthi-Saleh fighters from Aden, until early 2017, the conflict’s frontlines remained largely static in Yemen. Then, in January 2017, the coalition and allied Yemeni ground units launched “Operation Golden Spear.” The first phase of this was aimed to clear Houthi-Saleh fighters from the western coastline of Taiz, to secure the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, and to reclaim Mokha port. These stated objectives were achieved by the end of the month. However, the second phase of the operation – whose stated objectives included the retaking of Hudaydah port – quickly stalled.
On the ground, Houthi-Saleh units’ mass deployment of landmines and stiff resistance kept coalition backed-forces from advancing along the coast north of Mokha for most of the year. In early 2017 this spurred Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their supporters in Washington, D.C., to call for the US to increase military support for the Hudaydah offensive. The Saudi-led military coalition had long claimed that Iranian weapons were being smuggled to Houthi forces through Hudaydah port – a claim widely disputed by UN agencies.
Importantly, the administration of former US President Obama had rejected a 2016 request from the UAE for military aid to attack Hudaydah. The Obama administration had concluded that even with US support the assault was unlikely to succeed, given how well-entrenched and well-armed Houthi-Saleh forces were in the area. Obama’s advisors had also noted that the assault would dramatically exacerbate Yemen’s humanitarian crisis; the country had imported up to 90 percent of its food supplies prior to the conflict, with Hudaydah port since accounting for an estimated 70-80 percent of humanitarian deliveries and an even greater share of commercial imports. However, the belligerent rhetoric of the subsequent US administration toward Iran was widely seen to embolden Saudi-led military coalition attempts to solicit direct US military aid for a potential Hudaydah offensive.
March 2017 witnessed intense debate over the implications of a Hudaydah offensive among members of the US Congress, current and former government officials, and US agency representatives. Those advocating for robust US military involvement – including mainly Republican senators, some White House officials, and Pentagon staff – argued that capturing Hudaydah would help to secure Red Sea commercial shipping and would assist US allies to contain Iranian expansionism through proxy forces. US policymakers opposed to US involvement in a Hudaydah offensive raised concerns similar to those of the Obama administration, while also warning that the US risked being drawn into a military quagmire with no clear exit, noting that the Houthis posed no direct threat to US interests. US senators penned a bipartisan letter to the Trump administration noting that “Al Qaeda in Yemen has emerged as a de facto ally of the Saudi-led militaries with whom your administration aims to partner more closely.”
On March 17, following a Russian request, UNSC member states discussed the expected Hudaydah attack. During the discussion many member states expressed concern that the attack would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, though none went so far as to say that the assault should not take place. Following the briefing, UNSC member states released an “elements to the press” ‒ the weakest form of Security Council public statements ‒ calling for access for humanitarian and commercial goods in Yemen, including through Hudaydah.
Throughout April, the proposed assault and its likely humanitarian fallout dominated international policy discussions regarding Yemen. However, by month’s end, opposition within the US, at the UN, within the humanitarian community and elsewhere appeared to gain purchase. Among hawkish US policy makers and the Saudi-led military coalition, the rush to attack lost momentum.
Operation Golden Spear thus made almost no headway through 2017 until the death of former President Saleh in early December. Just days after Saleh’s death, UAE-backed local forces, supported by Sudanese troops, advanced north of Mokha and forced the Houthis to withdraw from Khokha district on December 7.
Although the stated objective of the second phase of Operation Golden Spear remains the capture of Hudaydah and its port, as 2017 ended it was unclear whether the coalition planned a more concerted attempt to achieve this objective.
Inland from Taiz’ western coastline, coalition-backed efforts focused on the capture of the Khalid bin al-Walid military base through much of the first half of 2017 – an objective the coalition achieved in July. Inside Taiz city, frontlines moved slightly in favour of anti-Houthi forces in 2017, while infighting among various anti-Houthi factions created security vacuums in areas ostensibly controlled by the Yemeni government. The most significant of these internal feuds within the anti-Houthi ranks pitted the UAE-backed commander Abbu al-Abbas and his Salafi fighters against various Islah-affiliated brigades. (For details, see ‘The evolution of militant Salafism in Taiz’, publish by the Sana’a Center on September 29, 2017.)
Among the most notable political developments with military implications following Saleh’s death was the public reconciliation between the Yemeni Islah party and the UAE. From the Saudi-led military coalition’s initial intervention in March 2015 until Saleh’s death, the UAE had been reluctant to coordinate with Islah-affiliated politicians and militias – such as those operating in the Taiz, Marib and al-Jawf governorates, among other areas – due to Islah’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Also following Saleh’s death, Houthi forces in Shabwa governorate lost control of Bayhan and Asailan districts. These two strategic areas, held by the Houthis throughout the conflict, provided a base from which to threaten the supply lines of Yemeni government troops and UAE-backed local forces. Barring a few pockets of resistance, Houthi forces were subsequently pushed out of the governorate altogether. In December, anti-Houthi forces also made new advances and territorial gains in al-Bayda and al-Jawf governorates.
Houthi territorial losses at the end of 2017 were significant in that they constituted the first major frontline movements in many months. However, in the overall military dynamics of the Yemen war, their strategic value is relatively minor. A decisive military victory by any side in the conflict appears no more likely at the beginning of 2018 than it did a year earlier.
Sudanese troops represented a major, underreported component of Saudi-led military coalition efforts on the western coastline in 2017, with thousands of Sudanese troops participating in Operation Golden Spear. An April brief by the Small Arms Survey suggested that several thousand Sudanese troops in Yemen are from Sudan’s “Rapid Support Forces” (RSF). The RSF are officially sanctioned paramilitary units that were largely formed from the Janjaweed militias – infamous for their genocide campaign against tribes in Sudan’s western Darfur region in the 2000s. Sudanese losses have been significant, with reports of over 400 Sudanese soldiers being killed in Yemen by mid-2017.
Timeline
In 2017, the United States under President Trump pursued a more aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) than it had under former President Obama. Shortly after President Trump assumed the presidency, US Special Forces conducted an unprecedented raid in al-Bayda. Further Special Forces ground operations were carried out throughout the year, such as those in Marib in May and in Shabwa three months later. These raids demonstrated that US Special Forces were operating in close coordination with their UAE counterparts.
The US also sharply increased the rate of its drone and airstrikes in Yemen throughout 2017. For perspective: the previous record of US-led aerial strikes, set in 2012, was 41 in a single calendar year. In 2017, the US surpassed this record in a single week in March as it conducted over 40 manned and unmanned aerial strikes in Abyan, al-Bayda, and Shabwa. In December, the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) stated that in 2017 the United States had carried out upward of 120 aerial strikes in Yemen against suspected militants from AQAP and Daesh (also known as the so-called ‘Islamic State’).
Importantly, the US military has an established track record of underreporting its counterterrorism activities; according to a report published by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic the US has disclosed details of only 20 percent of its lethal force operations in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan since 2002. The report notes that, as of June, the US had carried out at least 90 airstrikes in Yemen in 2017 using drones, aircraft and missiles. These strikes had led to at least 81 deaths, including 30 civilians.
In addition to the use of force, the United States sought to counter the threat of terrorism in Yemen through the exercise of soft power via the US Department of State and the US Department of the Treasury, which targeted various individuals and organizations in Yemen affiliated with AQAP and Daesh.
For its part, the UAE expanded its established anti-AQAP model in Yemen, which aims to counter the threat of AQAP through the build-up and deployment of local, UAE-backed forces in Yemen’s southern and eastern governorates. Among the main strategic objectives of this model is to clear and subsequently hold areas where AQAP is known to be active. In February 2017, the Shabwa Elite Forces were officially established after being trained by the UAE in Hadhramaut. The Shabwa Elite Forces were then subsequently deployed across the governorate – adding to the presence of the already-established UAE-backed Security Belt forces in Aden, Abyan, and Lahij, as well as the Hadrami Elite Forces that had all been formed in 2016. In mid-2017, the Shabwa Elite Forces engaged in a UAE- and US-backed attempt to clear strategic areas associated with the governorate’s oil and gas infrastructure. In parallel to the anti-AQAP operation in Shabwa, Security Belt forces in Abyan sought to gain control of key roads, including the main road that connects Abyan to al-Bayda, the coastal road that runs from Zinjibar through Shabwa to al-Mukalla in Hadramawt, and the road passing through the Lawder district of Abyan.
Despite suffering setbacks due to the counterterrorism efforts of the US and the UAE, AQAP remains an active threat. It is able to carry out attacks, recruit new membership, and deploy significant financial and military resources. Throughout 2017, AQAP continued its campaign of asymmetric warfare on several fronts, targeting UAE-backed forces in the southern and eastern governorates, while combatting Houthi-Saleh forces in the central al-Bayda and Ibb governorates where the Yemen affiliate of Daesh is also present.
It is worth noting that AQAP’s forced withdrawal from areas in Shabwa and Abyan in mid-2017 is not necessarily a sign of weakness. AQAP’s withdrawal can partly be explained by its grand strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with superior forces in order to preserve its membership and capabilities.
As illustrated by three significant terrorist attacks that occured in Aden in November, while comparatively smaller than AQAP, the Yemen affiliate of Daesh remained an active, arguably rising threat in 2017. Daesh in Yemen was most influential and active in al-Bayda governorate, where actions last year included a June 18 attack in which the group claimed to have killed 15 Houthi-Saleh fighters. The US military also claimed its first operations against Daesh in Yemen last year. The Pentagon said unmanned drones killed “dozens” of Daesh militants with missiles barrages on two training camps on October 16 and 25.
Timeline
In January 2017 a UN Panel of Experts report found that, up to that point in the conflict, all the belligerent parties had carried out “widespread violations” of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. This established pattern continued throughout the rest of 2017. The warring parties – including Houthi-Saleh forces, Yemeni government troops, the Saudi-led military coalition and affiliated local forces, as well as various non-state actors – regularly attacked civilians and civilian objects, launched indiscriminate attacks, carried out arbitrary detainments and torture, used banned weapons, impeded humanitarian aid and access, starved civilian populations, and carried out forced displacements, among other violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
In a major development in terms of accountability, the UN’s annual Children and Armed Conflict report – released in October 2017 and covering 2016 – included Saudi Arabia. The report stated that in its military actions in Yemen, Saudi Arabia had committed grave violations of the rights of children. Saudi Arabia was placed on the report’s so-called “child killer” list for its bombing campaign in Yemen, specifically for “the killing and maiming of children with 683 child casualties.”
Houthi-Saleh forces, Yemeni government troops, coalition-backed militias and AQAP have all been named in the report in two years in a row, and it should be noted that Saudi Arabia had initially been named in the 2016 report as well. Riyadh was, however, controversially removed from the 2016 report by then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, after threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for UN aid programs. Saudi Arabia’s response to being named in the 2017 report was significantly more moderate. This is likely due to considerable consultation between it and the UN in the lead-up to the announcement. There is also a noticeable difference in the nature of the report. Instead of listing Saudi Arabia as a standard offender, the report listed the kingdom in a new category specifically for violators who have taken actions to address the problems documented in the report.
Throughout the conflict, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly called for the creation of an international, independent body to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by all sides in the Yemen war. For the third year in a row, this proposal was blocked at the UN Human Rights Council, notably by Saudi Arabia, the US and the UK. However, in late September the UN Human Rights Council approved a resolution to establish a group of three experts to investigate human rights violations by all the belligerent parties. Importantly, the mission scope and capacity of the group of experts – who were appointed in December – is less than that of a commission of inquiry.
Notably, at year’s end media reports emerged that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein would step down in the summer of 2018. In an internal memo to staff explaining his decision, al-Hussein said: “I have decided not to seek a second four-year term. To do so, in the current geopolitical context, might involve bending a knee in supplication; muting a statement of advocacy; lessening the independence and integrity of my voice.” In the letter al-Hussein questioned the UN’s credibility as a champion of human rights when its top official, Secretary-General António Guterres, is reluctant to speak out against human rights abuses by powerful governments.
In commenting on al-Hussein to Foreign Policy, Philippe Bolopion, the deputy director for global advocacy at Human Rights Watch, described him as such: “In a world where human rights champions are few and far between, the High Commissioner has been a rare example of moral clarity, principle and independence.”
Timeline
The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies would like to sincerely thank all the people who have contributed to the publication of Yemen at the UN in the year 2017. They are, in alphabetical order: Ola Abdulla, Ziad Al-Eryani, Tawfeek Al-Ganad, Hamza Al-Hammadi, Maged Al-Madhaji, Osamah Al-Rawhani, Sala Al-Sakkaf, Aisha Al-Warraq, Wadah Alawlaki, Waleed Alhariri, Nickolas Ask, Yaaser Azzayyaat, Adam Baron, Anthony Biswell, Isadora Gotts, Marcus Hallinan, Alex J. Harper, Maxwell Jenkins-Goetz, Raed Khelifi, Michael McCall, Amal Nasser, Spencer Osberg, Mansour Rageh, Victoria K. Sauer, and Olivia Segal.
Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic, humanitarian, and human rights developments on the ground.
Yemen at the UN / Special Edition – 2017 in Review was developed in partnership with the Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
Summary:
In November, long-simmering tensions between the Houthis and the allied forces of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh erupted into armed clashes on the streets of Sana’a.
Sana’a Center analysis identified a decisive factor in the battles being that the tribal groupings surrounding the capital largely abandoned Saleh; this helped Houthi fighters seize the entire city and kill Saleh in early December.
The death of the country’s long-time strongman threw vast new complexities and uncertainties into the Yemeni conflict, though several near-term consequences appeared likely, including: the dissolution of the General People’s Congress (GPC) party in its current form; the weakening of Houthi frontlines with the loss of Saleh-allied divisions, and increased security risks for the Houthis as they face a divided general public in which aggrieved GPC loyalists outnumber Houthi partisans.
Earlier in November, Houthi forces fired a ballistic missile toward Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. Saudi officials claimed the missile had been smuggled from Iran, and in response the Saudi-led military coalition intervening in the Yemeni conflict ordered the closure of Yemen’s sea and air ports to all aid and commercial traffic.
The blockade sparked price surges and shortages of fuel and basic commodities across Yemen. United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock said that if the blockade was maintained Yemen would be launched into famine, and warned that it would “be the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims.”
The Saudi-led coalition reopened air and sea access to southern areas of the country held by Yemen’s internationally recognized government in mid-November, and then allowed limited UN aid access to the north at the end of November.
UN agencies and humanitarian organizations continued to condemn the blockade, however, pointing out that there is no viable replacement to Hudaydah port – currently held by the Houthis – in terms of bringing in enough food to feed the population, while humanitarian deliveries also cannot compensate for the loss of commercial imports.
UN agencies reported at the beginning of December that fuel shortages had caused water networks to break down in cities across the country, threatening to leave 11 million people without safe drinking water. UN agencies also report that the breakdown in sewage systems threatened to cause a renewed spike in Yemen’s ongoing cholera epidemic, which was approaching 1 million suspected cases by November’s end.
The Saudi-led coalition blockade of Yemen
Houthi missile attack on Riyadh
On November 1, Saudi-led military coalition airstrikes hit a market and a hotel in the Sahar district of Yemen’s Sa’ada governorate, killing at least 31 people including 6 children, according to the UN. On November 4, the Houthi-controlled defense ministry in Sana’a claimed that in retaliation for this strike it had launched a Scud missile targeting the King Khalid International Airport (KKIA) in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Pieces of the missile landed in the al-Nafal area of downtown Riyadh, while travellers at the airport’s domestic terminal reported hearing an explosion and soon after seeing emergency vehicles on the runway. While the Saudi government claimed its American-supplied Patriot Air and Missile Defence System had intercepted the Houthi Scud – a claim widely circulated as fact in international media – subsequent analysis by missile experts, published in the New York Times, suggested that the Scud’s warhead was designed to separate from the fuselage on approach to target and that Saudi air defenses almost certainly failed to intercept it.
In the hours following the attack on KKIA, the Saudi-led military coalition unleashed its fiercest bombardment of Sana’a in more than a year, including multiple strikes on the Ministry of Defense building.
On November 6 the Saudi government issued a statement stating the missile attack could “be considered as an act of war” by Iran and that “the Kingdom reserves its right to respond to Iran in the appropriate time and manner.” The statement added that the Saudi-led coalition was immediately closing all land, sea and air ports into Yemen “to address the vulnerabilities” in the cargo inspection procedures, which the Saudis claim Iran had been exploiting to smuggle weapons to the Houthis. Days later the United States administration of President Donald Trump issued a statement backing the Saudi position, calling on the United Nations to investigate Iran’s role in the Yemen war and for “all nations to hold the Iranian regime accountable” for allegedly violating UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions.
For its part, Tehran has repeatedly denied providing the Houthis with material assistance, while openly stating that it provides them with “advisory assistance.”
The blockade’s dire implications
Yemen is almost entirely dependent on imports to meet its basic commodity needs, historically importing as much as 90% of its food. Already the poorest and least developed country in the Middle East before the Saudi-led coalition began its military intervention in March 2015, Yemen has – through more than two and a half years of conflict since – witnessed precipitous economic collapse and the decimation of basic public services. Earlier this year the UN declared the country the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, among the aspects of which is that more than 7 million people are completely dependent on food assistance for survival.
Thus, the Saudi-led coalition’s implementation of a blockade against Yemeni ports on November 6 had immediate impact. Queues hundreds of vehicles long were reported at gas stations across the country in the days following, with price surges for almost all basic commodities and shortages of many, particularly fuel.
A week earlier, the Swedish mission to the UNSC had requested an update from Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock on his visit to Yemen at the end of October. Lowcock took the opportunity on November 8 to speak to the Security Council about the blockade’s implications. While condemning the Houthi missile attack on Riyadh, Lowcock said that if the Saudi blockade did not end soon, “there will be famine in Yemen,” warning that it would “be the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims.”
He then called for, among other things, the immediate resumption of UN and humanitarian flights to Sana’a and Aden, the resumption of humanitarian and commercial access to all Yemeni seaports, in particular regarding food, fuel and medical supplies, as well as an end to coalition “interference with, delays to or blockages of all vessels that have passed inspection by the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM). This is really important because humanitarian access through the ports was inadequate even before the measures that were announced on the 6th of November.” The UNVIM processes all cargo ships headed to the Houthi-controlled Red Sea ports of Hudaydah and nearby Saleef, to ensure the cargo does not violate the arms embargo against the Houthis stipulated in UNSC Resolution 2216.
Following the briefing, the UNSC issued ‘press elements’, the weakest form of official Security Council statements. This reiterated the need to implement the UNSC’s June presidential statement that called for, among other things, maintaining full access to Yemen’s sea and air ports, in particular Hudaydah, Yemen’s busiest port. Hudaydah accounted for 70 percent of all imports to Yemen in November 2016, even with coalition airstrikes having reduced the port’s offloading capacity. The UNSC press elements also condemned the Houthi missile attack on Riyadh and voiced support for the UNVIM.
Shortly after, Egypt – currently a member of the UNSC and also party to the Saudi-led military coalition intervening in Yemen – circulated a new draft presidential statement to council members. That text, widely thought to have been drawn up by Saudi officials, condemned the attack on Riyadh but made no mention of the humanitarian situation in Yemen. Russia noted this omission, as well as the draft text’s failure to mention political efforts to resolve the crisis, which led Russia to declare the draft unfit for council adoption.
Egypt then added a single sentence regarding the humanitarian situation and circulated the draft anew. On November 13, Bolivia, France, Italy, Sweden and Uruguay jointly broke silence on the new draft, stating that any official UNSC statement needed to be balanced and reflect current developments. There was no subsequent council action regarding the Egyptian draft presidential statement.
Obstruction of civilian imports and unchecked weapons smuggling
On November 10, the UNSC panel of experts submitted a confidential briefing to the 2140 Yemen Sanctions Committee. As reported by The Intercept, the panel wrote that the “imposition of access restrictions is another attempt by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition to use paragraph 14 of [UN Security Council] resolution 2216 (2015) as justification for obstructing the delivery of commodities that are essentially civilian in nature.”
The panel added that it saw no evidence that short-range ballistic missiles had been transferred to Houthi-allied forces from outside Yemen, and that “analysis of the supply route options by land, sea or air identifies that any shipments of the large containers used to ship and protect the missiles in transit would stand a very high chance of being interdicted in transit by the Saudi-Arabia-led [sic] coalition forces.”
From November 18 to 20, the panel of experts visited Saudi Arabia to investigate the recent missile attacks. On November 24, the experts then submitted an updated report in which they stated that the missile debris the Saudis presented them was “consistent with those reported for the Iranian designed and manufactured Qiam-1 missile,” as reported by Reuters. The report added that there was no evidence as to the missile supplier, that the missile was likely transferred to Yemen in pieces and then reassembled, and that the most likely supply routes were through areas in Yemen supposedly under government control, specifically “the land routes from Oman or Ghaydah and Nishtun in al-Mahra governorate (in Yemen) after ship-to-shore transshipment to small dhows, a route that has already seen limited seizures of anti-tank guided weapons.”
Sana’a Center sources have also suggested that the main entry point for goods smuggled into Yemen are bays and unofficial ports along the coastal strips of Shabwa and al-Mahra governorates, both of which are held by groups affiliated with Yemen’s internationally recognized government headed by President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Sana’a Center sources suggest these smuggling routes are managed by a wide network of businesses in Yemen that operate across the frontlines and are supervised by pro-government tribal chiefs, military commanders and political officials, all of whom reap large profits from supplying Houthi areas with smuggled goods, particularly arms.
Saudi-led coalition authorities, however, have consistently claimed that Iran is smuggling weapons to the Houthis through the port of Hudaydah, despite both UNVIM processing and coalition monitoring of ships docking there. Indeed, coalition spokesperson Turki al-Maliki claimed in late November to know definitively that the missile fired at KKIA had been smuggled through Hudaydah.
“Easing” the blockade
In mid-November the Saudi authorities announced that they would reopen ports in areas of Yemen’s south controlled by the Yemeni government, while all ports in the north would remain closed. Shortly after, on November 14, the Saudi-led coalition bombed Sana’a International Airport, destroying the aircraft radio navigation station.
Fifteen international nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies issued a press release on November 16 expressing “outrage” at the continued Saudi-led coalition blockade on northern Yemen. The statement said the Saudi move may amount to “collective punishment” by preventing “the entry of food, fuel, medicines and supplies, exposing millions of people to disease, starvation and death.” While acknowledging that the reopening of Aden port and airport was a positive move, the press release stated this was “insufficient to cover the needs of the entire Yemeni population.”
Indeed, as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has repeatedly noted, “there is no viable substitute for Al Hudaydah Port,” both in terms of infrastructure capacity and location – Yemen’s largest population centers are in the north, as well as 71 percent of those Yemenis in need of food assistance. As OCHA officials noted last month, attempting to transport food from Aden to the north would also involve “crossing conflict areas and frontlines, and can present delays, clearance restrictions, security-related complications, high transportation costs and disruption of supplies.” Meanwhile, land routes for food imports to Yemen would have the capacity to cover only a fraction of the country’s needs; a recent food security report noted that since 2014 less than 1 percent of Yemen’s wheat has arrived over land borders.
In the last week of November the Saudi-led coalition began allowing limited humanitarian access for UN cargo to Sana’a airport and Hudaydah port, while continuing to block commercial cargo deliveries. Importantly, however, humanitarian food deliveries account for only a small fraction of Yemen’s total food imports – between January and March 2017, only 3.5 percent of the more than 1.3 million tons of food imported to Yemen was in the form of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN’s Logistics Cluster, led by the World Food Programme (WFP). The heads of seven UN agencies highlighted such in a joint public statement on December 2. These agencies included the International Organization for Migration, World Health Organization, UN Development Programme, UN OCHA, WFP, UN Children’s Fund, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who collectively said that without the resumption of Yemen’s commercial imports mass starvation will happen.
The UN agencies said that the import restrictions had led to shortages in basic commodities and price shocks, with the cost of wheat flour jumping 30 percent, fuel prices doubling, and trucked water rising as much as 600 percent in various areas. The agencies said fuel shortages have caused water networks in seven cities to stop functioning and that more cities will follow shortly, which will leave 11 million people without safe drinking water. Fuel and water shortages are also forcing hospitals to close – half the country’s health facilities are already nonfunctional – while “sewage networks in six main cities are compromised, threatening a renewed spike in the country’s cholera outbreak, which has reached almost 1 million suspected cases and killed over 2,200 people,” noted the UN agencies.
The UN agencies reiterated that Yemen is on “the cusp of one of the largest famines in modern times. Nearly 400,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition and face an increased risk of death. More than 8 million people could starve without urgent food assistance coming into Yemen… This imminent catastrophe is entirely avoidable, but it requires immediate action by the coalition.”
Clashes in Sana’a and Saleh’s death
In northern Yemen tensions had for months been rising between the Houthis and the allied forces of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The fuel shortages brought on by the Saudi blockade further inflamed the enmity. Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC) party and Houthi officials traded public accusations over whether the Houthis were profiteering from the fuel crisis. Within the Supreme Political Council and the National Salvation Government – the official bodies in Sana’a that the Houthis and the GPC have used to implement joint governance – loyalists on both sides attempted blatant power moves to undermine the authority of opposing members.
Despite the rising hostility, Saleh himself was notably absent from the media for much of November. The former president did appear, however, on November 28 to give a speech in which he said that if the Saudi-led coalition lifted the blockade and stopped its bombing campaign, “decision makers” should stop firing missiles into Saudi Arabia.
The next day, fighting broke out between Houthi forces and GPC security at the Saleh Mosque in Sana’a over access and space for Houthi celebrations to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. The clasehs resulted in four dead Saleh supporters. Over the next several days, rhetoric and skirmishes between the two sides escalated. Abdulmalek al-Houthi, the movement’s leader, said publicly: “he who does not understand the concept of alliance and partnership, is an obstacle and knows only how to be a rival,” while the GPC referred to the Houthis as “cartoonish mercenary things.”
Local efforts at de-escalation were made on November 30, but by December 2 heavy clashes were being reported, with tank fire and heavy artillery rounds being heard across the city. That same day, Saleh made a televised speech condemning the Houthis, calling on Yemenis to rise up against them, and saying it was time to turn a new page with Saudi Arabia to end the conflict. The Saudis and the Hadi government in turn announced that they would support Saleh and the GPC against the Houthis.
For a brief period that weekend it appeared the GPC had gained the upper hand, capturing various areas of the city. This success was short-lived, however, with Houthi reinforcements quickly arriving from Sa’ada and Amran governorates.
By mid-Monday Houthi forces had retaken almost all of Sana’a, including overrunning Saleh’s home and the homes of his sons and family members. Shortly after video footage emerged online of Houthi fighters chanting and carrying a blanket in which lay Saleh’s body, with wounds in the abdomen and the back of the head. Conflicting accounts of his death emerged – one suggesting he has been killed fighting at his home; another, which the Houthis put forward, said he had been killed fleeing the city.
The Saudi-led coalition then began heavy bombardment of Sana’a, with the International Committee of the Red Cross reporting on December 5 that more than 230 people had been killed and 400 wounded in the capital during the recent violence.
Analysis: GPC-Houthi battles and Yemen after Saleh
Sana’a Center analysts noted that in the lead-up to Saleh’s death there was minimal fighting around the outskirts of Sana’a, despite the Hadi government announcing that it was moving the Yemeni army’s 7th and 8th brigades toward Sana’a in support of the “uprising” against the Houthis. This government announcement thus appears to have been more of a propaganda play in the media than a signal of real policy changes on the ground; there was, clearly, an inclination within much of the Hadi government and the Saudi-led coalition not to support Saleh, but rather to leave him to his fate.
This was made apparent when the coalition made little effort to cut off Houthi reinforcements arriving in Sana’a from the north to support those battling Saleh’s fighters in the city. Likely the most significant disappointment for Saleh, however, related to the tribes surrounding Sana’a. In the last few days before his death, powerful sheikhs and tribal leaders in Sana’a recognized that the tide was turning against Saleh, making these pivotal figures unwilling to back him in a lost cause.
Simultaneously, the Houthis were able to secure these tribal allegiances during the battles with Saleh through both bribery and threats. This came on the back of the Houthis having, for more than two and a half years, used their access to state resources to purchase tribal loyalties. There were a small number of exceptions, but overall the tribal circle around Sana’a – with whom the former president had spent more than 30 years forging ties – broke with Saleh in the end.
Now the Houthis have complete control over Sana’a and there is, for the first time, the centralization of power in the northern and western regions of Yemen under one party. The alliance of convenience and the political divisions between the Houthis and the GPC that characterized authority in the north over the past two and a half years have ended. The disintegration of the GPC is likely. Saleh was essentially the heart of the party; it was his personality, dynamism and skilled relationship building that held together under one political banner the many disparate parties that constitute the GPC. Without him as this central gravitational force, it is unlikely the party can survive in any recognizable form.
While it is expected that the Houthis will try to maintain a symbolic GPC party to have a structured body that can incorporate current GPC membership and followers, the Houthis will almost certainly keep ultimate authority. Meanwhile, the Yemeni government and the Saudi-led coalition are also attempting to keep a version of the GPC intact to counter the Houthis. These competing factors could result in a pro-Houthi GPC branch based in Sana’a, and a pro-Yemeni government GPC branch based in a coalition country, if not also further GPC branches elsewhere. In any circumstance, the GPC as it is currently known is unlikely to survive.
Importantly, the Houthis have not come out of the recent clashes with major gains, other than eliminating Saleh as a political competitor. Indeed, the Houthis can no longer count on the many Saleh-allied divisions that had been fighting alongside them against the internationally recognized government and the Saudi-led coalition. This can only weaken the Houthi frontlines – as demonstrated on December 7 when UAE-backed forces quickly seized from the Houthis Khokha city in Hudaydah governorate. The Houthis now also face a divided general public in which aggrieved GPC loyalists outnumber Houthi partisans. These tensions will likely create widespread security risks for the Houthis across large areas where the population does not support them, but rather submits to them only by force and intimidation.
Detailed future scenarios are difficult to envision, with Saleh’s death adding new complexity and uncertainty to any calculations. However, the immediate momentum the Houthis have garnered from the Sana’a battles, Saleh’s defeat and the consolidation of power in the north will almost certainly make a peaceful political solution unobtainable in the near-term.
In brief
Economic developments
Humanitarian developments
Human rights developments
Political and diplomatic developments
Security developments
This report was prepared by Waleed Alhariri, Spencer Osberg, Maged al-Madhaji, Tawfeek al-Ganad, Victoria K. Sauer and Marcus Hallinan.
Yemen at the UN is a monthly series produced by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. It aims to identify UN-led efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen and contextualize these efforts relative to political, security, economic and humanitarian developments on the ground.
This month’s report was developed in partnership with Friedrich-Ebert Yemen office.
