Rebels are part of a global Islamist army at war with Israel and the West
THE Houthis remain defiant after Thursday night’s show of force by British and American warplanes, which saw 100 ‘precision strikes’ launched on 60 targets in western Yemen. The Yemeni militia claimed just five of its fighters died in what Rishi Sunak called a ‘limited, necessary and proportionate’ act of ‘self-defence’ against the group’s repeated and increasingly disruptive attacks on Western shipping.
Yesterday, a senior White House spokesman was forced to stress that America was ‘not interested in a war with Yemen’. Yet the potential for escalation – as a regional conflict swiftly draws in other countries – is obvious.
Houthi leaders have already warned that the air strikes will not go without ‘punishment or retaliation’. And if US President Joe Biden and the Prime Minister hoped the bombardment might make the Houthis rethink their strategy in the Red Sea, they were surely mistaken. So what’s next?
For weeks, the Houthis have been disrupting global supply chains and causing millions if not billions of dollars of damage to the international economy. A consensus had grown that this had to be met in robust terms.
But getting into a war is easy. Getting out of one can take years. And it seems fanciful to expect even targeted strikes to neutralise the Houthi threat immediately.
For a start, this is no rag-tag guerilla force wielding machetes and scavenged AK-47s. They are highly motivated, battled-hardened fighters, lavishly financed by the mullahs of Tehran. Numbering 20,000 troops – drawn mostly from the Houthi movement of northwest Yemen – they have been waging a deadly battle to run their country for decades.
In 2014, they finally seized control of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
The following year, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, with their vast military budgets and Western-built jets, intervened on the side of the official Yemeni government.
After a bitter war claiming 300,000 lives, the Houthis emerged victorious and in control of Yemen’s western regions bordering the Red Sea – the perfect base from which to disrupt global shipping.
Needless to say, their leaders will have known their ongoing attacks would eventually spark retaliation from the US and its allies.
But they will also have reasoned that as they resisted the Saudis – who brandish the latest Western armoury and every explosive short of nuclear weapons – so they could resist whatever the Americans might throw at them.
And they may be right. Now comes the inevitable political fallout of the Western response – with tensions in the Muslim world already running high thanks to the crisis in the Gaza Strip. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has declared that the West is turning the Red Sea into a ‘sea of blood’.
In Yemen itself, thousands turned out to protest the strikes. Such images will be beamed around the world, with Arab and Iranian TV networks particularly relishing them.
But what exactly is driving the Houthis in the first place? The truth is that they have made their hatred of Israel a core part of their political identity. Their attacks on civilian ships – allegedly in support of Palestinians – have proved wildly popular at home.
It would therefore be a fatal mistake to equate the Houthis with their counterparts on the opposite shore of the Red Sea: Somali pirates who also menace international shipping. Pirates simply want loot, and scurry home when they get it. Houthi leaders want, among other things, the obliteration of Israel.
Their territory is nearly 1,500 miles from Gaza, but the Houthis see themselves as part of a global Islamist army waging war on the Jewish state and the West. Asked why they had chosen to embroil themselves in a conflict so far from home, one Houthi warlord retorted: ‘Does America’s President Biden live in the same block of flats as Israel’s Netanyahu?’
They are lucky that the narrow stretch of water in which they operate – the ‘Gates of Grief’ or Bab el-Mandeb Strait – is the jugular vein of world trade. Barely 20 miles across, it is narrower than the English Channel, but 12 per cent of international maritime cargo passes through it.
AND needless to say, this week’s air strikes will be unlikely to reassure the global shipping giants, many of whom are avoiding the region, that stability has been restored.
If the disruptions continue, Britain’s supply of oil (which leapt above $80 a barrel yesterday) and liquefied natural gas will be severely impacted, as will deliveries of computers, smartphones and practically every other import on which the modern economy thrives. Inflation will soar again, sharply bringing this faraway conflict into ordinary Britons’ lives.
The cost of opening a new front in the Red Sea, moreover, will stretch Britain and American military to breaking point.
On Tuesday, the Houthis fired multiple oneway attack drones at Nato ships, costing as little as $500 (£390) each. In response, the Royal Navy Type 45 air-defence destroyer HMS Diamond shot down seven, using Sea Viper missiles that cost more than £1 million apiece.
The Houthis have one clear goal: to exploit the conflict in Gaza and turn it into a regional war that could see Iran and perhaps other actors intervene, and Israel eventually wiped off the map.
The Western allies cannot let the latter happen, of course. But it will take the greatest skills of international diplomacy, and a well-calculated military strategy, to avoid this crisis deteriorating into a historic disaster.