“Why is there war in Yemen? From the humanitarian crisis to the growing connection with the conflict between Israel and Hamas”
While the civil war in Syria expanded throughout the region, while the United States tried for the last time to win in Afghanistan, and while separatists rose up with the support of Russia in eastern Ukraine, a direct antecedent of the current invasion, at the end of 2014 another conflict broke out in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.
That regional civil war still continues, almost a decade later, in the shadow of these other conflicts and almost in the background, having already unleashed a humanitarian crisis in the country that does not seem to be close to ending.
And now, the conflict has become linked to the war between Israel and Hamas that began on October 7, as the Houthi rebels increased their attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea in alleged revenge against Israel and the United States and the United Kingdom responded with a series of attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen.
But how did it start, who are they facing and what relationship does it have with Gaza?
Yemen is located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, with coastlines on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and has borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman.
With a population of about 30 million—where Sunni Islam predominates—Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, according to the World Bank.
The start of the civil war in Yemen
For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, the country was affected by political instability and violence, and starting in the 2000s the situation worsened first with the presence of al Qaeda cells—the so-called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which motivated a U.S. military drone operation—and then with the uprising of the Houthis, a Shiite minority that comes from the north of the country and demanded more representation in the Sunni-led government in 2014.
The war in Yemen has been described as the world‘s worst humanitarian crisis, and is seen as both a civil conflict, which has nearly disintegrated the country, and a larger confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It certainly transcended borders and became a regional conflict, with attacks launched by the Houthis against targets in Saudi Arabia, and constant bombing of Houthi-controlled territory by the Arab coalition, of which the United Arab Emirates is also a part, which they have caused enormous suffering to the civilian population.