As Yemen’s civil conflict grinds on, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis will deepen and a political settlement will become harder to reach over the next year, driving a cycle of instability that will keep the war-torn country a geopolitical proxy theater. The civil war in Yemen recently entered its seventh year, creating what the United Nations and other international organizations now see as the deadliest humanitarian crisis in the world. And it’s a crisis that still has no clear end in sight, as cyclical warfare patterns and evenly-matched military actors on either side continuously push the conflict further away from a political settlement or cease-fire.
- The Yemen civil conflict began in 2014 when Houthi rebels occupied the country’s northern capital of Sanaa, demanding equal distribution of resources, territory and political control. Saudi Arabia entered the conflict in March 2015 to support the anti-Houthi government and lead a pan-Arab coalition alongside Yemeni government forces. Yemen’s internationally-recognized government operates out of the southern city of Aden, as well as the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
- Resource scarcity has become an increasingly profound problem in Yemen over the course of the war. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) predicted in 2019 that if the conflict lasts through 2022, Yemen will be the poorest country in the world. In 2021, the UNDP reported that the conflict has permanently erased $126 billion of potential economic growth that will never be recovered, and that 80% of Yemen’s population are now fully reliant on aid and financial assistance. The value of Yemen’s currency recently suffered an unprecedented collapse driven in part by years of continued war.
- The number of people in Yemen both directly killed in conflict-related violence (i.e. combat or air raids), as well as those indirectly killed by the fallout from the ongoing civil war (i.e. hunger, preventable diseases), is expected to total 377,000 by the end of 2021 — with children under the age of five making up 70% of those deaths, according to a U.N. report released in November.
Persistent Houthi drone and missile attacks against Saudi territory stoke a cycle of military escalation that makes it difficult for the warring sides to back down. These attacks — which pose a threat to Saudi Arabia, as well as Yemeni government forces and civilians — are becoming more frequent. Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-led Yemeni government coalition always respond to such Houthi attacks with retaliatory airstrikes and boosted ground offensives. Houthi capability improvements and their seemingly endless arsenal of projectiles — some sourced from Iran, others from internal stockpiles and workshops — means that Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government will likely continue to respond militarily to Houthi strikes, continuing a tit-for-tat cycle of violence and destruction.
- In early December, the U.S. special envoy to Yemen said Saudi Arabia had suffered 375 cross-border attacks since Jan. 1. This is an uptick from the number of such attacks the kingdom saw in all of 2020, thanks in part to recent Houthi technological improvements.
Key frontlines remain deadlocked despite intense fighting, making each side reticent to withdraw. Fighting remains heavy along the front lines in the central provinces of Shabwa and Marib, as well as the coastal area of Hudaydah. The lack of territorial exchange indicates that the warring sides on the ground are relatively evenly-matched. Moreover, the resources in these areas — namely, Marib’s oil reserves, Hudaydah’s port and coastal territory, and Shabwa’s politically valuable land — lower the incentive for either side to back down from the frontlines. While continued stagnation is likely, the frontlines will shift if Saudi Arabia deems the material and human losses too costly to maintain, or if the Houthis’ recruitment efforts begin to stumble.
- In recent months, fighting in Marib has been particularly intense and cyclical, displacing the same Yemeni civilians multiple times as the epicenter of the conflict advances and retreats. A UNDP report released on Dec. 12 indicated the ongoing violence in Marib had displaced 45,000 individuals since just this past September.
The prolonged war has exacerbated the civil conflict’s initial drivers, making them harder to resolve. Resource inequality and scarcity, locals’ mistrust of external actors (including Saudi Arabia and Iran), and societal, sectarian and geographic divisions between Yemeni communities were among the drivers to spark the conflict in 2014. All of these factors have grown worse over the course of the war, reducing the probability of a negotiated end to the conflict.
- The 2019 Riyadh agreement led to the early 2021 formation of a Yemeni government that included northern and southern leaders, while excluding Houthi rebels. But residual mistrust between Yemen’s northern and southern factions has continued to impede deeper cooperation beyond maintaining a common front against the Houthis, preventing the Yemeni government from presenting a strong and unified front in peace negotiations both domestically and globally.
Given these factors, Yemen’s warring parties are unlikely to reach a political settlement in 2022. The ongoing conflict will, in turn, keep Yemen as a key geopolitical proxy theater for Saudi Arabia, Iran and other external actors with interests in the region. Yemen’s deepening instability is one of the factors currently pushing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to consider rapprochement with Iran — which provides economic and technical support to Yemeni Houthis — in the hopes that closer communication with Tehran will mitigate the threat of conflict spilling over into Saudi or Emirati territory. The strategic imperatives compelling Riyadh to maintain its overall military intervention in Yemen, however — namely, the need to ensure Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity and preventing a Shiite, Iran-leaning or extremist government from taking the helm in Sanaa — are unlikely to shift over the next year. With the Saudi-led Yemeni coalition remaining squarely on one side of the war, and Houthi rebels remaining on the other, every cease-fire effort in 2022 is likely to break down along the familiar fault lines that have stymied previous political settlementsaimed at ending the conflict. The continued conflict will also force the United States to remain involved in Yemen in order to protect Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s key regional partners, from the growing threat of Houthi missile and drone strikes.
- Iran continues to provide Houthi rebels in Yemen with both arms and defense equipment, as well as military support. The extent of Tehran’s economic support to the group, however, remains unclear.
- The latest U.N. effort to cajole a cease-fire in November garnered significant media attention but saw little traction on the ground with warring actors.
- Since taking office, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has tried to reduce the United States’ explicit involvement in the Yemen civil conflict by scaling back the scope of U.S. cooperation with the Saudi-led coalition in the country. But Washington remains Saudi Arabia’s primary provider of military equipment and recently completed a sale of defensive arms to the kingdom.