Neville Teller
Yemen is at the epicenter of national and international interests at odds with each other and battling for supremacy. At the heart of the turmoil is Iran, financing and weaponizing the Houthis in order to establish both a strong Shia presence on the Arabian peninsula, and a continued front against Israel to replace the weakened Hezbollah and Hamas. The burden of suffering has fallen on the hapless people of Yemen. They continue to bear the human cost.
Today’s catastrophe started in the sadly misnamed “Arab spring” uprisings of 2011. Inside Yemen they resulted in mass protests against the long dictatorial rule of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He was forced to step down in favor of his vice-president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. In 2015 Hadi sponsored a revised constitution for Yemen that proposed a federal system split between northerners and southerners, but the Iran-backed Houthi rebels rejected it.
The Houthis are a fundamentalist Shia group. The ex-president, Saleh, although a Sunni Muslim, decided to collaborate with them in a bid to return to power. It was through Saleh that the Houthis were able to gain control of most of the Yemeni military, including its air force. As a result, and supported with military hardware from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they overran large tracts of the country, including the capital city, Sana’a.
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