The War in Yemen and the Making of a Chaos State
A strange and worrisome silence settled over over Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa after Houthi rebels seized power in broad daylight one September day in 2014. For weeks, rumors had been floating that something of this sort would occur. But most everyone thought a genuine coup d'état would be much more dramatic.
“I was actually wandering around the city and there was this eerie quiet,” said Iona Craig, an independent journalist who was living in Sanaa the day the rebels officially seized power, taking government buildings, even the military headquarters. “I remember I was very close to the Ministry of Defense and somebody called me and said, ‘The Houthis have taken the Ministry of Defense.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, because there’s not a single shot being fired. I’m standing 150 meters away from it.’”
And so hardly anyone noticed much of this outside of Yemen. That wasn’t unusual for the Arab region’s poorest country, which rests quietly across from Somalia on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, astride the world’s fourth-busiest petroleum-shipping choke point.
Once it had become clear that Houthis had seized Sanaa, and were resolutely marching south to the port city of Aden, the fate of a struggling nation’s 26 million people—8 million of whom were already facing famine conditions — began a dark turn for the worse. Basic government functions, already shoddy, ceased almost entirely. In the eastern seaport of Mukalla, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula briefly ran its own de facto state, largely because it was willing to clean the trash off the streets.
Two-thirds of Yemenis were already what the UN called “food insecure” before the Houthis advanced south, but in the nearly three years since then, Yemen and the wider Middle East have plunged into dangerous instability. Never known as an international tourist draw, the country has recently made headlines for outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria—and ballistic missiles that travel hundreds of miles toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh. With the war on ISIS slowing down in Syria and Iraq, Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The thousand-day war in Yemen has embroiled nearly a dozen nations, most of them allied closely with Saudi Arabia. That means most of them are, by extension, allied against Iran, which stands accused of arming the Houthis. Of particular concern, the commander of U.S. Central Command told reporters Monday, is that Iran is arming the Yemeni rebels with ballistic missiles. General Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, has said that this created a “growing missile threat that is being orchestrated by Iran through the Houthis, and which I think poses a significant danger, not just to Saudis and Emiratis, but in cases where we have our forces and citizens co-located it poses a risk to us.”
A few of those Saudi allies are wondering how to proceed, now that the Saudi-led war on the Houthis has largely stalemated in a horseshoe around Yemen’s western highlands. And even though the Saudis have succeeded in some respects along the southern coast, the broader fighting has accelerated the country’s descent from failed state into a “chaos state.”
“Yemen more closely resembles a region of mini-states at varying degrees of war with one another, and beset by a complex range of internal politics and conflicts, than a single state engaged in a binary conflict,” wrote Peter Salisbury, a researcher with the London-based Chatham House policy institute, in a December report on the country.
Yemen has been a hotbed for extremism since the Afghan civil war
