Hoping for peace with the Houthis, the Saudis are keeping a low profile in the Red Sea conflict
After Iranian-backed rebels took over Yemen’s capital in 2014, a 30-year-old Saudi prince named Mohammed bin Salman led a military intervention to drive them out.
With American assistance and weapons, Saudi pilots began a bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen, the mountainous country on their southern border. Officials expected to quickly defeat the rebels, an irregular tribal militia known as the Houthis.
Instead, the prince’s forces spent years locked in a conflict that culminated in fighting between multiple armed groups, drained billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s coffers and helped plunge Yemen into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, hunger and uncontrolled disease.
Saudi Arabia and its main partner, the United Arab Emirates, eventually scaled back their military involvement — partly under U.S. pressure — and Saudi officials began peace talks with the Houthis, who secured control of northern Yemen.
Now the war in Gaza has thrust the Houthis – whose ideology is driven by hostility toward the United States and Israel and support for the Palestinian cause – into an unlikely global spotlight.
The militia is creating chaos in the Red Sea by sending missiles and drones toward Israel and commercial ships, and the United States has assembled an international maritime coalition to deter them and is considering other measures to counter the group.
Saudi Arabia, however, prefers to watch these latest developments from the sidelines, with the prospect of peace on its southern border a more attractive goal than joining an effort to stop attacks that the Houthis say are aimed at Israel – a state that the kingdom does not follows. officially recognize and which is widely maligned by its people.
Crown Prince Mohammed is now the de facto Saudi ruler and according to Saudi and US officials, he is not interested in a conflict with the Houthis.
“To have a stable region, you need economic development across the region,” Prince Mohammed said on television interview in September – shortly before the war in Gaza began – when Saudi officials hosted a Houthi delegation in the Saudi capital Riyadh. “You don’t need to see any problems in Yemen.”
As the prince rushes to make progress on his sweeping plan to try to transform Saudi Arabia into a global business hub by 2030, he has worked to calm conflict and tensions in the Middle East, including through rapprochement the kingdom’s regional rival, Iran. .
Saudi officials and analysts say the return of Houthi missiles flying over Riyadh or hitting southern Saudi cities – a relatively common occurrence at the height of the war in Yemen – is the last thing the prince needs as he tries to deter tourists and investors tries to convince that the Islamic kingdom is open for business.
“Escalation is not in anyone’s interest,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, said in a speech. television interview this month. “We are committed to ending the war in Yemen and we are committed to a permanent ceasefire that opens the door to a political process.”
Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The new Saudi strategy in Yemen – which moves away from direct military action and focuses on cultivating relations with Yemeni factions – is driven by the reality that the Houthis have effectively won after eight years of war. As the fighting has subsided, the militia – which adheres to a religious ideology inspired by a sub-sect of Shiite Islam – has taken power in northern Yemen, where it has created an impoverished proto-state that it rules with a iron fist.
While they face the prospect of conflict with the United States with undisguised glee, the Houthis are leveraging their extensive military capabilities and an apparent fearlessness that was honed in their clashes with the Saudi-led coalition.
If the United States sends soldiers to Yemen, its troops will face a conflict worse than the drawn-out wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the militia leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, threatened in a televised speech on Wednesday. The Houthis are “not afraid” to fight the United States directly and would even prefer to do so, he stated.
If the Houthis say they want war with America, they also appear to have used the Gaza conflict as an opportunity to advance a central goal.
“Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews” is part of the group’s slogan, and the Houthis have portrayed their attacks on commercial ships as a just fight to force Israel to end its siege of Gaza.
The Houthis are also a major branch of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes armed groups across the Middle East — although Yemeni analysts and Saudi officials say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group and not a purely Iranian one proxy.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr al-Houthi demanded that other Arab countries step aside and “let the Americans and Israelis enter into direct war with us.”
“If you want to dance on the bodies of victims, then dance,” he said – a veiled reference to a series of recent concerts in Saudi Arabia, including one Metallica performance. “But do not join the Americans in a war against us.”
For the Houthis, such a war would be a “golden opportunity for them to realize their narrative, allow them to easily recruit people and gain credibility,” said Shoqi Al-Maktary, a Yemeni senior advisor at Search for Common Ground , an organization in Washington. -based organization that works to resolve conflicts.
That’s especially true as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – launched in response to Hamas’ deadly attacks on October 7 – is causing grief and anger across the Middle East, directed not only at Israel, but also at the United States, its most important ally.
Before the war in Gaza began, the Houthis were on the verge of signing an American-Saudi-backed peace deal that would potentially consolidate their position of power and allow the international community to declare the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen .
At least so far, the Houthi response to the war in Gaza does not appear to have diminished Saudi Arabia’s appetite for a deal on Yemen, analysts said.
“The war in Gaza has not undermined talks between the Houthis and the Saudis — on the contrary, it has brought them even closer together,” said Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group.
In an interview with The New York Times Times in late September, Ali al-Qahoom, a member of the Ansar Allah Politburo, the political arm of the Houthis, said negotiations with Saudi Arabia had been “full of seriousness and optimism.”
Mr al-Qaloom said they had discussed how to facilitate salary payments for civil servants – who have not been compensated for years – and the possible reopening of airports and ports, steps that could ease the suffering of millions of Yemenis in desperate need of aid light up. .
“Our positions were quite close,” Mr al-Qahoop said. “What is hindering reaching an agreement is the denial of commitments by Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Britain and America to address the destruction caused by eight years of war and other issues such as reconstruction and reparations.”
That appeared to be a reference to the monetary compensation the Houthis expect to receive from Saudi Arabia as part of an incentive for a deal.
Analysts say the Saudi government will likely introduce some form of payment to seal the deal.
Amid these negotiations with the Houthis, Saudi Arabia has also continued to cultivate a warmer relationship with Iran, its longtime enemy. President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran made his first visit to Riyadh in November.
This week, the United States announced a naval task force to tackle the Houthis threat in the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were not among the members; the only Arab nation to join was Bahrain, where the move sparked popular anger.
Saudi Arabia “is not interested in any Western attempt to protect Israel,” said Sulaiman al-Oqeliy, a Saudi political commentator. wrote on the social media platform X. Many experts in the Gulf have also spoken out frustration with the US in recent days, to argue that U.S. policy toward the war in Yemen helped the Houthis prosper.
The United States respects that some countries may have “domestic reasons” for staying out of the task force, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said. told reporters.
U.S. military planners have prepared preliminary Houthi targets in Yemen should senior Biden administration officials order retaliatory strikes, two U.S. officials said. But military officials say the White House has shown no appetite to respond militarily to the Houthis and risk a broader regional war.
“Sometimes in the Middle East you don’t have good and bad decisions,” Prince Mohammed said in a speech interview in 2018, when asked about the war in Yemen. “Sometimes you have bad decisions and worse decisions.”
Ahmed Al Omran, Shuaib Almosawa And Erik Schmitt reporting contributed.