A large-scale military operation is under way in the Middle East and it’s being led by Saudi Arabia – with more than 100 fighter jets and 150,000 ground forces, according to Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya News. And the Saudis are not alone.
More than half a dozen countries from the Middle East – plus Pakistan, Sudan and Turkey – are offering military help to the Saudis. The U.S. – a long-time ally of the Saudis – has said it will provide logistical and intelligence support, but American troops will not be directly involved.
Operation Decisive Storm is focussed on Saudi Arabia’s neighbour – the often volatile country that is Yemen, where rival Sunni and Shia groups have fought for control. The Saudis say they are coming to the aid of the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who has been under increasing pressure from a growing Houthi insurgency.
The Houthis belong to a collection of tribes that identify with a branch of Shia Islam, Zaidism, and represent a third of Yemen’s population – and they no longer see Mr. Hadi’s government as legitimate. If the Houthis succeed and take over, that outcome would be bitterly resisted by Sunni groups who say the Houthis are backed by Saudi Arabia’s rival – Iran.
As the conflict develops, there are worries about a broader regional war – and that’s in a region where Iraq and Syria are already conflict zones and a major focus of Western military efforts.
The Yemen conflict is also important because it intersects with four ongoing problems.
1. The fight against AQAP
Islamic State advances in Syria and Iraq have been the main pre-occupation of Western and Middle Eastern countries over the last year. But for years, the West has been trying to defeat al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group based in eastern Yemen. The United States has carried out drone strikes targeting its fighters and leaders, and it has bolstered the Yemeni government and military with counterterrorism training and resources.
AQAP has carried out attacks in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and one of its most important ideologues, the U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, has inspired attacks abroad – the Fort Hood army base shootings in Texas in 2009; the failed underwear bombing plot on a Detroit-bound Christmas-day flight in the same year; and a 2010 printer cartridge plot that was intercepted on cargo planes destined for the United States. Mr. Awlaki’s convoy was hit by a U.S. drone and fighter strike in September, 2011.
But even as the U.S. has lauded its counterterrorism success in Yemen, AQAP’s influence has not entirely waned. One of the brothers involved in the shootings at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris told a French TV network that he had been trained and financed by AQAP.
The fear now is that years of building up counterterrorism efforts and intelligence-gathering on the ground in Yemen will be washed away – and AQAP could flourish.
The U.S. embassy in Sana closed last month. Over the weekend, 100 U.S. special forces were pulled out. “If at some future point you want to go back in there, you’re starting from scratch,” a U.S. special operations officer told Foreign Policy magazine.
2. The piracy fight
For years, Somali pirates targeted cargo ships carrying goods and humanitarian aid through shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. Occasionally, pirates used remote Yemeni islands as launching points.
But a lot has changed thanks to an international armada of ships from NATO, the EU and the United States that has been patrolling and protecting ships in the waters off of the Horn of Africa. There were 176 attacks on ships in 2011, but that fell to only two in 2014, figures from the EU Naval Force show.
Could there be a full-blown return to the days of pirates preying on cargo ships? The presence of a large-scale international effort to protect the shipping lanes makes it unlikely. But anti-piracy efforts are not meant to carry on indefinitely. NATO says its mission will end next year and its ultimate goal is to help countries in the region, like Yemen, fight piracy themselves. As Yemen descends in to further conflict, chances are remote that Yemen would be capable of monitoring its coasts and curbing smuggling and piracy.
3. The price of oil
Saudi Arabia, with 16 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, is the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil. By moving against the Houthi Shia militias in Yemen, it runs the risk of the conflict spilling over in to Saudi territory – and that would raise questions about the security of Saudi oil fields and supply.
It’s that kind of scenario – and worries around the security of oil shipments – that will push global oil prices up, as it did on the morning after the military operation was announced. But the prices appeared to slide back as markets realized that there is no imminent threat to oil shipments.
“The risk for oil-supply disruption due to this conflict is low, but the bullish fear reaction on the back of the headline alone is very strong,” Bjarne Schieldrop of SEB Markets told The Wall Street Journal.
How the conflict unfolds in the coming days and weeks – and whether it impacts the movement of oil tankers in the waters off Yemen – will be watched closely.
Much of the world’s oil passes through a narrow passage called Bab el-Mandeb, between Yemen and the Arabian peninsula and Djibouti on the African continent. The passage is less than 40 kilometres across and is described by analysts as a “chokepoint” when it comes to global oil supply. If there is any disruption to global oil shipments, it could have a significant impact on oil prices.
As a security measure, Saudi Arabia’s ally Egypt has sent four warships to protect the Gulf of Aden, according to Reuters.
4. Iran’s role
For years, Yemeni governments have accused Iran of backing the Houthi militias in the north. Now that Saudi Arabia and its allies have launched their military operations, Iran’s response will be key.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have been conducting a proxy war in the region. In Syria, for instance, Iran backs the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, while the Saudis fund Sunni Syrian rebels. The latest escalation in Yemen will put Iranian-Saudi rivalries on a different level and raise concerns about a wider conflict.
“What has until now been an unacknowledged proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two great powers of the Middle East, has now burst into an open confrontation that appears to be escalating rapidly as other countries and players are sucked in. The primary Saudi aim is to pacify Yemen, but its wider objective is to send a powerful message to Iran: stop meddling in Arab affairs,” writes The Guardian’s foreign affairs columnist Simon Tisdall.
The United States is also wary of Iran’s growing influence and foothold in Middle Eastern countries like Yemen and Iraq. But in Iraq, it gets complicated. The United States and its allies are trying to push back Islamic State fighter through air strikes. Iran is backing Shia militias on the ground in Iraq as they encircle Islamic State strongholds.
And just to add another layer of complexity: U.S. and Iranian negotiators are in the home stretch in negotiations towards deal over Iran’s nuclear program.