Saudi-Arabiens unsichtbarer Krieg
With a stalemate in Yemen, a humanitarian crisis worsens.
A battlewagon roars through the gates of a beach villa on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, a luxury property with a six-meter chandelier and indoor pool, now repurposed as a busy field hospital. Young fighters leap from the pickup and hoist a wounded comrade, blood streaming down his face, into the emergency ward.
A piece of shrapnel had lodged in his right eye. The fighter groans. “Please, Hameed” he calls to a fellow fighter, a glint of panic in his one good eye. “My head feels heavy.”
The Saudi- led war in Yemen has ground on for more than three years, killing thousands of civilians and creating what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. But it took the crisis over the apparent murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate on October 2 for the world to take notice.
Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, under scrutiny over the Khashoggi case, now faces a fresh reckoning for his ruthless prosecution of the war in Yemen — yet another foreign policy debacle for Saudi Arabia, and a catastrophe for the Arab world’s poorest country.
Outside Yemen, the war has been largely overlooked.
The Saudis barred foreign journalists from northern Yemen, scene of the biggest airstrike atrocities and the deepest hunger. The conflict is mostly unknown to Americans, whose military has backed the Saudi- led coalition’s campaign with intelligence, bombs and refueling, leading to accusations of complicity in possible war crimes.
Since June, the war has centered on the Red Sea port of Hudaydah. We made a rare visit this month to the battlefield at the city gates. There we saw what the war looks like up close, from the side
of the Yemenis who are fighting and dying in it.
In 2015, Prince Mohammed sent Saudi warplanes to bomb Houthi rebels who had seized control of western Yemen and who he saw as a proxy for Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, Iran.
Originally a movement of Shiite guerrillas from the northwest, the Houthis rose to power in the turmoil that followed the Arab Spring in 2011. After capturing the capital, Sana, in 2014, they controlled Yemen’s three largest cities. Iran aided their advance with military equipment, including missiles.
Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have led a military coalition in a war aimed at ousting the Houthis and restoring an internationally recognized government. But early promises of a swift victory have given way to a bloody stalemate, while the war has inflicted a catastrophic toll on Yemenis, including widespread hunger and the worst cholera epidemic in history.
In Hudaydah, the war has settled into a desultory rhythm. The fighting crests at dawn and dusk, when fighters on both sides rain mortar shells across the front line.
Within minutes, pickup trucks screech to a halt outside the field hospital, off-loading wounded fighters — men smeared in dirt and blood, peppered with shrapnel or felled by a sniper’s bullet.
Civilians soon follow: mothers hit by mortar shells, badly malnourished children, elderly people with legs blown off by land mines.
Financed by the Emirati Red Crescent, the hospital at Durayhimy has an air of quirky, controlled chaos. Fighters slinging Kalashnikovs crowd the emergency room, standing anxiously over medics working to save their wounded comrades.
Dr. Hazza Abdullah, 34, the doctor on duty, said he embraced the promise of change back in 2011, when the Arab Spring protests swept Yemen and the region. “I thought it would be like the French Revolution, that it would open doors,” he said. “Instead we are going through hell.”
The battleground arcs across a sandy wasteland of deserted farmhouses. There, we saw pickups loaded with fighters racing through the desert, dodging sniper fire and enemy mortars. Closer to the front line, fighters in sarongs hunkered behind sandy berms. Warplanes whizzed by. A pair of cows, caught in the cross- fire, lay rotting in the dust.
We joined a group of jihadist fighters for lunch at their flophouse near the front line. Mortar tubes were positioned outside the gate. Inside, fighters scooped up handfuls of rice and chicken, led by a cheery commander with a bandage on his forehead where he had been grazed by a sniper’s bullet.
In seeking to capture Hudaydah’s port, the coalition hopes to deprive the Houthis of millions of dollars in monthly tax revenues and force them to the negotiating table. But Hudaydah is also the gateway to a starving nation: Three- quarters of Yemen’s 28 million people rely on some form of relief aid, and the vast majority of it passes through the port.
Under intense international pressure, the coalition promised Western officials it would not fight in the city or the port. Now, both sides are dug into positions on the city’s fringes.
A secondary front extends for about 130 kilometers to the south, where the fight takes place in remote villages.
The United Nations says this secondary front is the deadliest area for civilians. At least 500,000 people have fled their homes, many forced to shelter in squalid refugee camps in towns like Mokha, a small port once famous for its coffee exports, and nearby Khokha.
Khokha buzzes with a lawless air. Fighters mill about in the town center. The main drag is jammed with military convoys headed for the front. Refugees, soldiers and Houthi spies mingle in the town bazaar.
The United Nations and most Western relief agencies have deemed the area too unsafe to serve. A notable exception is Doctors Without Borders, which recently opened a hospital in Mokha.
For most refugees, the main worry is their next meal. At the city dump in Mokha, Thabet Bagash rummaged for glass bottles and tin cans.
Before fighters ejected him from his home, he was a farmer. Now, he said, he was reduced to this. If he collected a bagful of cans, he might earn $1.40 — enough to feed his five children for a few days.
Just 130 kilometers from the garbage dump, two upstairs rooms at the field hospital might as well be on another planet. In one, the Emirati Red Crescent has installed a gleaming new operating theater, in the other a six-bed intensive care unit.
But the medical equipment is untouched. The authorities couldn’t find medical staff to work there — Yemeni or Emirati.
That seemed emblematic of the Emirati way of war. The United Arab Emirates pays wages for fighters, and equips them with rockets and million- dollar armored vehicles.
But Emirati generals direct the fight from the relative safety of Aden, the main city in southern Yemen, where the bulk of the estimated 5,000 Emirati soldiers in Yemen are based. Emirati warplanes and naval boats pummel targets in Hudaydah from the air and sea.
Saudi naval boats also patrol the waters off Hudaydah.
But on the front line, Emirati and Saudi soldiers are hard to find. Coalition bases along the coastal highway are guarded by Sudanese recruits, many from Darfur. At the field hospital, the dead and wounded we saw were Yemeni.
It was too late for Mohammed Kulaib by the time his friends rushed him to the hospital. The 20-year- old had been shot in the chest. After a brief attempt to resuscitate the fighter, a medic declared him dead.
Mr. Kulaib’s brother, Yahya, stood over the body in the emergency room. The brothers were part of the Tihama Resistance, whose fighters come from the coast — one of at least a dozen Yemeni militias that fight under the coalition banner. After the medics left, Yahya Kulaib leaned over his dead brother. He kissed him on the forehead, pulled a gray blanket across his face, then gently tied a knot in his shroud.
Despite over 18,000 coalition airstrikes since 2015, the front lines remain largely unchanged. Around Hudaydah, the Houthis have seeded vast tracts of land with mines, on a scale second only to that of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, according to Conflict Armament Research.
United Nations-led efforts to broker a peace have failed; both sides feel they have more to gain from fighting, said Gregory D. Johnsen, a scholar at the Arabia Foundation. “Years of airstrikes failed to dislodge the Houthis, and their leaders now feel secure,” Mr. Johnsen said. “They think they can wait out the Saudis.”
In the meantime, more brothers will bury brothers, it seems likely, before it is over.