Saudi coalition starts assault on Yemen port
Vehicle convoys head toward the rebel-laden city
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen’s exiled government began an assault Wednesday morning on Yemen’s port city of Hodeida, a crucial battle in the 3-year-old conflict that aid agency warned could push the Arab world’s poorest country into further chaos.
Before dawn Wednesday, convoys of vehicles appeared to be heading toward the rebel-held city on the Red Sea, according to videos posted on social media. The sound of heavy, sustained gunfire clearly could be heard in the background.
Saudi-owned satellite news channels and later state media announced the battle had begun, citing military sources. Houthi media did not immediately report the attack.
Yemen’s exiled government “has exhausted all peaceful and political means to remove the Houthi militia from the port of Hodeida,” it said in a statement. “Liberation of the port of Hodeida is a milestone in our struggle to regain Yemen from the militias.”
Forces loyal to Yemen’s exiled government and irregular fighters led by Emirati troops had neared Hodeida in recent days. The port is some 90 miles southwest of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital held by Shiite rebels known as Houthis.
Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash earlier told French newspaper Le Figaro the deadline for a withdrawal from Hodeida by the Houthis expired early Wednesday morning.
The United Nations and other aid groups already had pulled their international staff from Hodeida ahead of the rumored assault.
Over 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen’s civil war. The Saudi-led coalition has been criticized for its airstrikes killing civilians. Meanwhile, the U.N. and Western nations say Iran has supplied the Houthis with weapons from assault rifles up to the ballistic missiles they have fired deep into Saudi Arabia, including at the capital, Riyadh.
Before the war, over 70 percent of Yemen’s food and fuel imports came through Hodeida, accounting for over 40 percent of the nation’s customs income. The port remains crucial for incoming aid, food and medicine for a nation driven to the brink of famine by the conflict and a Saudi-led blockade.
The U.N. says some 600,000 people live in and around Hodeida, and “as many as 250,000 people may lose everything— even their lives” in the assault.
The Yemen government and its Gulf partners will likely claim a turning point in the three-year conflict if they defeat the Iranbacked Houthi rebels. Yet a loss or even a drawn-out conflict with an army of experienced street fighters that causes significant civilian casualties would deal another blow to Saudi efforts to win the war.
“Taking the port and the city could shut off supplies to major Houthi rebel groups and lead to a drive to the negotiating table,” said Paul Sullivan, a Middle East analyst at the National Defense University in Washington. “However, urban warfare in a city this size could prove to be costly and a lot longer than some may try to predict.”
Rebel forces were building concrete bunkers, positioning snipers in buildings and calling in reinforcements from other areas, residents said by phone. From mosques and loudspeaker cars, they urged supporters to fight “the mercenaries of aggression,” residents said.
U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths was shuttling between the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to try to head off a clash, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday.
International aid groups had been warned to evacuate their staffs from Sana’a by Tuesday, aid group Oxfam International said in a statement. The U.K.’s Department for International Development warned aid workers that diplomatic efforts were failing, according to British newspapers.
“An attack on Hodeida will bring death, destruction and push vital resources like food, fuel and medicine even further out of reach,” said Oxfam’s Yemen chief, Muhsin Siddiquey.
During the war, the Saudi-led coalition has disrupted food and other supplies coming into Yemen by imposing a naval blockade on ports including Hodeida in the Houthi-controlled north.
Today, three-quarters of the country’s 28 million people need aid to stave off hunger and disease, and half of those require it urgently to survive, according to the U.N. Of an estimated 1.8 million children under age 5 who are acutely malnourished, 400,000 are so severely underfed they are at 10 times the normal risk of dying, the U.N. says.