The Perils of Downplaying Yemen’s Conflict – March 2024

Yemen was just three years into the conflict that will enter its tenth year this month when Omayma[1] was struck by a sniper’s bullet. Her village in a rural part of Taiz province was a frontline then, in 2018, and the trauma of getting shot so close to home sent her fleeing into the siege of Taiz City to live with her sister and heal. Unfortunately, while Omayma was still in physical therapy and learning to walk again, her sister was also shot by a sniper when she went out to collect drinking water for the family from a tank in their suburb. Unlike Omayma, her sister will never walk again since the sniper’s bullet struck her spine and left her paralyzed.

Today, Omayma still lives with her sister in that suburb of Taiz City—Yemen’s largest urban settlement to host active frontlines—and helps to care for her sister’s five sons in a home alongside a small stream that floods the house during heavy rains. Her sister’s husband brings home a little income for the household when he can find work as a day laborer, but it is never enough to make ends meet. Omayma still relies on a crutch to get around, and snipers still prey on civilians in the city. According to the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project (CIMP), 47 civilian casualties were reported in Yemen as a result of sniper fire in 2023, and 40 of those were in Taiz. Most recently, sniper fire killed a civilian in Taiz on March 15.

For nearly a decade, activities like walking down their own street to get water have been changing life forever for Yemeni civilians like Omayma, her sister, and the civilian killed in Taiz this month. Through most of those years, the rest of the world was largely too busy to notice the impact on those who had the misfortune of landing in the crosshairs of Yemen’s warring parties. That changed in November, however, when those sights started falling on ships sailing along Yemen’s Red Sea coastline—and ever since, the global community has been busily calculating the cost of Yemen’s crisis to their own lives.

Between November 19 and March 17, Yemen’s Houthis launched over 70 attacks on ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. At least 22 of the attacked vessels took direct hits from missiles or drones, and on March 6, three seafarers on a merchant ship were killed in the first strike to result in fatalities. On March 2, a ship carrying 21,000 metric tons of ammonium phosphate sulfate fertilizer sunk nearly two weeks after it was hit by a Houthi strike—threatening marine life in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, in the first half of February, the Suez Canal that links the Red Sea to the Mediterranean had already reported a 42 percent drop in monthly transits and an 82 percent decrease in container tonnage from its peak in 2023.^[2]

Prior to the Houthis’ attacks, the Suez Canal was used by roughly one-third of global container ship cargo. Now ships are re-routing around Africa’s southern Cape of Good Hope, a detour expected to cost up to $1 million USD in extra fuel for every round trip between Asia and northern Europe. In the meantime, regional anger against the US for supporting Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has allowed the Houthis to successfully promote the narrative that their maritime attacks are a legitimate means of defending Palestinians from what they describe as existential aggression from the West. This stance is receiving a great deal of support—even from some who have actively opposed the Houthis in the past—and may give the group leverage to sink Yemeni society into a new cycle of domestic conflict.^[3]

On October 10, a few short days after the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel—when Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was just beginning—Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al Houthi made a speech calling Yemenis to be ready to defend Palestine. Since then, the Houthis claim they have recruited more than 70,000 new fighters—a mobilization effort that the US has helped to further fuel with its efforts to downgrade the group’s capabilities to attack ships. While continuing to veto UN resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—where over 31,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 73,000 wounded in just over 160 days—the US and seven allies[4] launched more than 40 waves of strikes inside Yemen between January 12 and March 17. While those strikes have destroyed Houthi launchers, surface-to-air missiles, storage and support areas, unmanned air, surface, and underwater vehicles, and a few other facilities—they have also impacted civilians with strikes that hit farms, telecommunications networks, a pesticide factory, and a technical institute. According to CIMP, the strikes had resulted in a total of 10 civilian casualties by February 28. Furthermore, in an Arab Digest podcast posted on March 6, Yemen expert Helen Lackner explained how conflict inside Yemen intensified in February as the Houthis sent their new and newly roused recruits to Yemen’s frontlines.[5]

Meanwhile, the Houthis have also continued to attack ships. According to Yemeni analysts at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, the group’s weapons caches and missile launch bases can be moved easily and are spread all over the country—meaning that the impact of a few dozen strikes against them is likely to be limited.^[6] Years of intense Saudi bombardment failed to deter the Houthis—who instead began to attack targets inside Saudi Arabia—and some US officials are now arguing that it is impractical to keep firing multimillion-dollar missiles at cheap Houthi projectiles. Thus, with consternation growing over the Houthis’ ability to hold the Red Sea hostage, at least one thing is becoming increasingly clear—Yemen matters.

Beyond the Houthis’ impact on the surface, a deeper threat is also emerging. On February 24, three cables under the Red Sea that connect global internet and telecommunications networks were cut. Yemen’s Internationally Recognized Government (IRG) had previously alleged that the Houthis were planning to attack the cables. However, what actually cut them is unclear and the Houthis have blamed the disruptions on British and US military operations. Regardless of what caused them, the cuts affect 25 percent of the data traffic flowing through the Red Sea, and the East African nation of Djibouti suffered interruptions two days later. A total of fourteen such cables currently run under the Red Sea—handling about 17 percent of all international data traffic, including lines that carry over 90 percent of communications between Europe and Asia. Some of these lines are in relatively shallow water depths of as little as 300 feet, where they could be reached by divers. Meanwhile, repairs to the already severed cables could be delayed since it will be difficult to find cable ship owners willing to operate within range of Houthi missiles—as well as insurers who will cover the war risk while the crews are at work.[7]

The Houthis’ adventures in the Red Sea are likely to only bring more suffering to war-weary Yemenis like Omayma—whether from the ecological damage caused by sunken ships or by pushing up food and fuel prices and causing delays in shipments of lifesaving goods. Nonetheless, they are bringing attention to the nation that Yemeni suffering could not. Since 2022, international narratives have largely reported that Yemen’s conflict was winding down and that governments and aid agencies could safely allow it to drift off the radar. All the while, the daily crises faced by Yemeni families were ratcheting up. While Yemen’s Red Sea coastline bore responsibility for the safe transit of $3 billion to $9 billion USD worth of the world’s cargo each day,^[8] donor fatigue and the emergence of new conflicts left the UN’s 2023 humanitarian response less than 43 percent funded—with under $2 billion to spread over 365 days of need lived by millions of sick, hungry, and traumatized Yemenis who had long since exhausted all their coping capacities.[9]

While it is tempting to trust narratives that intractable conflicts can be solved quickly—the Houthis are offering a clear reminder of how the lived realities of civilians like Omayma in failed and fragile states can ultimately have consequences for everyone in an increasingly interconnected world. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project ranked Yemen ninth on its 2023 Global Conflict Index, which highlighted the nation’s protracted conflict for extreme and consistently occurring violence. ACLED’s index assesses every country and territory in the world according to the four indicators of deadliness, danger to civilians, geographic diffusion, and armed group fragmentation.^[10] During 2023, ACLED recorded a total of 3,045 political violence events across Yemen, including 982 battles, 1,393 explosions/remote violence events, 656 events of violence targeting civilians, and 14 riots. It described these events collectively as a continuation of low-intensity conflict that has upheld consistently severe violence nationwide. Meanwhile, ACLED specifically noted that the share of violence targeting civilians in all political violence across Yemen spiked in 2023—climbing to 37 percent—more than twice the previous high of 15 percent recorded at the start of Yemen’s war in 2015.^[11]

Furthermore, according to CIMP, shelling was the leading cause of civilian casualties due to armed violence in Yemen in 2023, accounting for more than 25 percent of the total number of civilian casualties reported. This high rate of shelling casualties is another indicator that Yemen’s conflict is, in fact, ongoing. Landmines and unexploded ordnance may continue to inflict civilian casualties long after a conflict has stopped, while casualties from shootings and small arms fire often result from disputes unrelated to the war. Shelling, however, is limited to active frontlines. Moreover, 81 percent of the civilian shelling casualties recorded in 2023 were reported in Sa’ada province on the border with Saudi Arabia. Although Sa’ada saw more civilian casualties in 2023 than any other province for the third consecutive year, reports on the most dangerous frontline for Yemeni civilians are almost never found in Western media outlets, nor outlets based in other Arabian Peninsula countries. Those arbiters of the news, which tend to focus on Western and Saudi interests, prefer to highlight the siege of Taiz—where civilian casualties can be largely blamed on the Houthis. A report from inside Taiz shared by ITV News in February, showed the toll that more than eight years of siege has had on children in the city where Omayma is caring for her sister’s five sons—including an eight-year-old girl who weighs just 15 pounds.[12]

While the harm endured by Omayma and her sister and other civilians across Sa’ada, Taiz, and all over Yemen has rarely made headlines in the West, the Houthis are likely to continue lobbing reminders into the Red Sea of just why the state of Yemen matters to the global community. Meanwhile, the action—or inaction—of the international community outside of Yemen will continue to have life-changing consequences for Yemen’s most vulnerable and those who try to aid them. On January 5, Dr. Akeed Qaed, a staff member of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), was killed after Friday sermons in front of his house in Yemen’s Al Dhale’ province. A Yemeni national, Dr. Akeed had worked for ADRA for three years.^[13] His death served as a stark reminder of the risks borne by personnel associated with international non-profits in Yemen as Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza continue to charge an atmosphere in which individuals can be easily radicalized to react with attacks on those perceived as representatives of allies and supporters of Israel. Thus, as disruption of trade in the Red Sea inconveniences producers and consumers worldwide—perhaps the international community will also find that underestimating the plight of its most vulnerable members rarely pays off in the long term.[14]

[1] Names changed to protect vulnerable Yemenis.

[2] The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, The AP, Reuters, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Reuters, Reuters, The Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera, Reuters, Sky News, Reuters, Anadolu Agency, The Times of Israel, The Times of Israel, The AP, The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies,