Yemen has been suffering under a brutal civil war for over a decade, but newfound factors are exacerbating one of the Middle East’s most dire humanitarian crises. The country has been trying to dig itself out of this hole, but continued pressure from Yemen’s Houthis — who are engaged in conflict with U.S. forces — is making this a difficult task.
American bombs began falling on the Iran-backed Houthis, the terrorist group controlling northwest Yemen, on March 15 (followed by a highly publicized Signal leak of the operation to a journalist from The Atlantic). This bombing campaign, spearheaded by President Donald Trump, has had limited success, The New York Times found — but it could cause the country’s already significant humanitarian crisis to spiral.
Yemen’s humanitarian crisis
Yemen has been dealing with a humanitarian crisis since it devolved into civil war in 2014, but the recent campaign against the Houthis has “killed civilians and brought further destruction and uncertainty to the poorest country in the Middle East,” said The Guardian. As part of their pushback against the U.S., Houthi fighters are reportedly blocking off bomb sites — but towns are being “hit in the middle of the night, which is a sure-fire way to kill civilians,” said Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, to The Guardian.
Saba, a Houthi-led news agency, has reported that the U.S. performed an “aggression targeting of al-Rasoul al-Aadham Hospital Project for Cancer Treatment in Sa’ada city.” Western outlets have not verified this, but “independent groups have also suggested a high degree of civilian harm.” These types of attacks “may usher in a new phase of war and instability for Yemen,” said Al Jazeera.
And while Trump has claimed that the Houthis have been “decimated by the relentless strikes,” that is “not what Pentagon and military officials are privately telling Congress and allied countries,” said the Times. These officials have “acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers,” while at the same time potentially bombing civilians.
‘You never know which way things will go’
With the bombings ramping up, aid workers “never know which way things will go,” Siddiq Khan, a Yemen director for the aid organization Islamic Relief, said to The Guardian. These attacks have “further scared the organizations here about whether this will be the right place to stay and work. So overall, there’s a huge vacuum” of aid workers.
Compounding this is Trump’s slashed funding for foreign aid, including the nation’s primary civilian foreign aid group, USAID. The White House is attempting to shut down USAID permanently and transfer any remaining duties to State Department offices. Beyond this, the United Nations “suspended its humanitarian operations in the stronghold of Yemen’s Houthi rebels” in February following a Houthi attack, said The Associated Press. This additionally affected the “global response to one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.”
To prevent additional humanitarian problems in Yemen, the U.S. needs to “avoid targeting civilian infrastructure,” said Mohammed Al-Basha, an analyst who founded the Yemen consultancy Basha Report, to PBS News. It should also minimize as many civilian casualties as possible, which will “avoid giving the Houthis any means or tools to use as propaganda that the airstrikes are killing civilians.” Beyond this, the “regional powers and the anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen need to sit down and figure out” a long-term policy.