Houthis’ violence continues as US struggles with Yemen minefield

Yemen’s Houthi movement said on Monday it had fired armed drones at an airport and air base in southern Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-aligned group said it had intercepted an explosive drone.

This appears to be the first news of Houthi drones being fired into Saudi Arabia in almost a week.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said three drones had been fired at military targets at Abha airport and the King Khalid air base in the southern town of Khamis Mushait. He said the targets had been struck.

There was no immediate Saudi confirmation that those locations had been hit, but the coalition said it had intercepted a Houthi drone early on Monday fired towards Khamis Mushait.

Houthi attacks into Saudi Arabia have escalated in recent weeks.

On March 7, the coalition said a barrage of drones and missiles had been intercepted en route to their targets, which included an oil storage yard at Ras Tanura, site of a refinery and the world’s biggest offshore oil-loading facility as well as a residential compound in Dhahran used by state-controlled oil giant Saudi Aramco.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 after the Houthis ousted the Saudi-backed government from power in the capital, Sana’a. The conflict is widely seen in the region as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The United Nations and the United States have urged the Houthis, who are also pressing an offensive against government-held Marib city in Yemen, to turn to negotiations rather than military escalation.

 Washington’s push for ceasefire

US special envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking said last week a “sound plan” for a nationwide ceasefire in Yemen has been put to the Houthi leadership.

Washington’s push has energised a once lifeless peace process, observers say, but savage fighting in the country’s north has thrown up yet another barrier.

“Lenderking has been doing the rounds in the region, engaging with parties to the conflict,” a Gulf-based Western official said.

“American involvement is bringing new momentum” to end the stalemate, the official said. “The support for Griffiths has never been stronger.”

Despite the optimism, Lenderking received a cool response to his proposal to kick off a revived peace process, and a source close to the UN efforts said the initiative is effectively on hold until the battle raging outside the city of Marib is won or lost.

The Iran-aligned Houthis are throwing everything they have at the fight for the capital of an oil-rich region, sustaining heavy casualties as a price worth paying for the last piece of the north that the government still controls.

Its capture would hand the rebels an important new revenue source as well as a stronger position at the negotiating table, or even embolden them to push for more territory.

The battle is “holding back the negotiations … because the Houthis want to see how far they can go,” the source familiar with the UN efforts said.

Lenderking has said he will return to the region when the Houthis “are prepared to talk.”

“We now have a sound plan for a nationwide ceasefire, with elements that would immediately address Yemen’s dire humanitarian situation directly,” he told an Atlantic Council virtual conference on Friday after a 17-day trip to the Gulf.

“That plan has been before the Huthi leadership for a number of days,” he said.

“Tragically, and somewhat confusingly for me, it appears that the Houthis are prioritising a military campaign to take Marib over … suspending the war and moving relief to the Yemeni people.”

 A complex situation

The Houthis’ chief negotiator Mohammed Abdusalam, who a source said met with Lenderking in Oman — a popular neutral ground for negotiations — dismissed the envoy’s proposal on Friday as containing “nothing new.”

However, the journalist who interviewed him on militia-controlled Al-Masirah television later tweeted a “clarification,” saying Abdusalam was commenting on the plan “in its current rather than final form, and confirmed that the debate about it is still ongoing.”

The situation is infinitely more complex than when the Houthi militias drove president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s government out of Sana’a.

Since then, the country has fragmented, with the government battling southern separatists in a conflict dubbed a “civil war within a civil war,” along with the rise of militant groups and the shifting role of Yemen’s influential tribes.

Yemen’s recent history is littered with failed diplomatic interventions, and the government is now extremely weak, with Hadi long exiled to Riyadh.