The exchange of hundreds of prisoners between the warring parties in Yemen has raised expectations for a long-term truce between the Ansar Allah (Houthi) rebel government in control of much of Yemen and the Saudi-backed troops allied to the internationally recognised government. Numerous Yemenis have died as a result of the eight-year civil conflict, which has also triggered a serious humanitarian catastrophe.
With rampant starvation, sickness, and attacks on people, the country is experiencing one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the whole globe. An UN-mediated cease-fire in 2022 reduced tensions and improved humanitarian circumstances, but the parties to the conflict failed to extend the agreement after six months
The Genesis of the Yemen War
Yemen, located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is the second-largest Arab sovereign state on the Arabian Peninsula. With an estimated population of 33 million people, 46% under the age of 15 and 2.7% beyond the age of 65, Yemen is predicted to reach around 60 million people by 2050. The country’s economy is primarily services, with petroleum production accounting for around 25% of the GDP and 63% of total government income.
The main agricultural goods produced in Yemen include grain, vegetables, fruits, legumes, qat, coffee, cotton, dairy products, fish, animals, and poultry. However, the agricultural sector faces challenges due to its high percentage of net food-buying families and low GDP contribution. The most widespread crop is sorghum.
The growth of Khat, a psychotropic plant that emits a stimulant when chewed, is a major concern in Yemen, using up to 40% of the water withdrawn from the Sana’a Basin annually. This has led to an extra 6% of the population falling into poverty in 2008 alone. Prior to the Ansar Allah takeover, the then government and the Dawoodi Bohra community were working to replace qat with coffee plantations in Yemen’s northern governorates.
Severe water shortages, particularly in the Highlands, are a major issue, with high levels of poverty making it difficult to recoup expenses for providing services. Water supply sanitation is difficult to access, and Yemen is the most impoverished and water-scarce nation in the Arab world.
The 2015 Yemeni civil war has exacerbated the situation, with 80% of Yemen’s people having trouble accessing water for drinking and bathing. UNICEF has made attempts to collaborate with partners to provide clean and ongoing drinking water to 8.8 million of the people in Yemen.
The most recent phase of Yemen’s war began in 2014, and it is being waged by two major alliances. On one side is Ansr Allah,the erstwhile Saleh-Houthi coalition. On the other side is a collaboration between Saudi Arabia and President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s rump administration, which took over when Saleh resigned in 2011 as a result of the Arab Spring events. Hadi is currently in exile in Riyadh, which intervened in the fight in a largely futile attempt to prevent the Ansr Allah led alliance, which has been backed by Iran, from conquering the entire country.
After fleeing Sana’a in the early months of 2015, Hadi resigned, which complicated the nature of the UN-backed transitional administration created in an attempt to administer Yemen from the southern port city of Aden. Due to a subsequent Houthi attack, Hadi felt forced to flee Aden for exile in Saudi Arabia. Later that year, he attempted to return to Aden, but he ended up serving as president of a government in exile.
As a result of the involvement of regional powers, mainly Iran on the one hand and very loosely allied Gulf states on the other led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen has been sucked into a regional proxy conflict along the greater Sunni-Shia divide. In 2015, Saudi Arabia imposed a maritime blockade to prevent Iran from supplying the Houthi led Ansar Allah government with supplies.
In response, Iran dispatched a naval convoy, raising the prospect of a military clash between the two countries. A political council was established in 2016 by the Houthis and former president Saleh to run Sana’a and northern Yemen. Saleh split from the Houthis in 2017 and urged for armed resistance, which resulted in his death. The Southern Transitional Council (STC) was formed in 2017, had southwestern regions under its authority, and was amalgamated into governments that were recognised internationally in 2019. The STC, however, has difficulties.
Early in March 2021, the Houthi rebel (Ansar Allah) government carried out missile airstrikes in Saudi Arabia, including targeting oil tankers, installations, and international airports. In February 2021, the Houthi rebel government started an offensive to take Marib, the final stronghold of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, was the target of airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in response to the uptick in assaults.
Yemen now faces the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in the world as a result of the enormous toll the conflict has taken on Yemeni people. The UN believes that indirect factors including food shortages and a lack of readily available healthcare contributed to 60 percent of the projected 377,000 fatalities in Yemen between 2015 and the beginning of 2022. Twenty-five million Yemenis, or over 74 percent, still require aid. Over one million people have been impacted by a cholera outbreak, and five million more are at risk of being hungry. There have been human rights and international humanitarian law violations on all sides of the war. The present humanitarian catastrophe is being made worse by an economic crisis.
Further Background on the Yemen Crisis
Conflicts between Yemeni government forces and the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, marked the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2015. Millions of civilians have been displaced from their homes during the past seven years as a result of violence and economic downturn, and 73 percent of the population now urgently needs humanitarian aid. Yemen was the Middle East nation with the greatest vulnerability even before the present catastrophe. Its malnutrition rates were among the worst in the world, and half of its people lacked access to potable water and were living in poverty.
At the beginning of the conflict, about six million Yemenis were forced to flee their homes, including 4.3 million internally displaced Yemenis. Yemen has the fifth-highest number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the world at the end of 2021, behind Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Afghanistan.
Since many of the internally displaced people have been living in exile for years, their little resources are being strained, and the conditions are becoming harsher. In Yemen, many IDPs reside in hazardous areas that are marked by pervasive food shortages and a lack of access to water, healthcare, and sanitary facilities. The advent of the COVID-19 epidemic and the possibility of an impending famine in the nation made their predicament much more difficult. Yemen is the third biggest home of Somali refugees in the world despite the turmoil, hosting about 97,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Somalia and Ethiopia
Humanitarian Impact
Yemen’s key issues include the prospect of widespread starvation, conflict, deteriorating services, and long-term displacement. As a result of seven years of continuous fighting, which has substantially raised the already high level of demands brought on by years of poverty and insecurity, the country is on the point of economic collapse. Yemen now has a population of 23.4 million people that require humanitarian assistance.
Yemen has never experienced such widespread famine. Despite ongoing humanitarian assistance, 17.4 million Yemenis do not have adequate food, a figure that is anticipated to climb to 19 million by December 2022.
Yemen, according to the UN, is experiencing the worst humanitarian disaster in history.
According to the UN, 4.5 million people have been displaced, or one out of every seven. Humanitarian help and protection are required for 80% of the population, or 24.1 million people.
According to the UN, six million people in Yemen are on the verge of becoming hungry, and tens of thousands are currently facing famine-like conditions. Yemen’s conflict is predicted to have killed over 377,000 people by the beginning of 2022, with starvation, a lack of access to healthcare, and polluted water accounting for 60% of those fatalities.
The violence is known to have directly resulted in the deaths or injuries of nearly 11,000 children, according to the study. Furthermore, Yemen has seen one of the deadliest cholera epidemics ever recorded, with 2.5 million suspected cases and almost 4,000 fatalities since 2016.
Women and children are disproportionately affected by the problem. They account for 79% of those who have been internally displaced, and their position is deteriorating. As of March 2021, one in every four Yemeni households who had evacuated their homes had a woman or girl as the head of the household, with 20% of them being under the age of 18.
Women and girls are forced to bear the burden of sustaining their families due to engrained cultural expectations, despite injustice, a lack of access to resources, and a variety of other challenges. Due to excessive inflation and a lack of economic opportunities, many individuals can no longer afford basic food, and they face heightened risks of starvation, gender-based violence, exploitation, and early marriage. Yemen continues to have some of the world’s worst rates of acute malnutrition, affecting 1.3 million pregnant or nursing women in need of assistance.
Children in Yemen continue to die and be injured as a result of the conflict, and they are also dying at frighteningly high rates from preventable diseases and starvation. In Yemen today, 2.2 million children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition and must be treated. Yemen is one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises, with nearly 11 million children in need of assistance.
Yemen’s national socioeconomic systems are still on the edge of collapsing after eight years of conflict, and families are more vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks as a result of the war, mass displacement, and periodic weather shocks. Furthermore, the country continues to have epidemics of cholera, measles, diphtheria, and other ailments that can be avoided with immunisation. Millions of children do not have access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene services.
Yemen continues to be one of the world’s most serious humanitarian disasters. A whopping 21.6 million people would require humanitarian aid by 2023, with 80 percent of the population unable to put food on the table and access essential services.
Women and girls have suffered disproportionately as a result of eight years of violence, economic collapse, natural calamities, and the COVID-19 epidemic. Their access to life-saving sexual and reproductive health care has been severely limited due to the health system’s near-collapse. Every two hours, a woman dies during pregnancy or delivery from reasons that are virtually fully avoidable with access to treatment. More than 1.5 million pregnant and nursing women are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2023, increasing the risk of adverse birth outcomes and malnourished infants.
Role of International Actors
Yemen is once again at a critical juncture one year after the parties agreed to a truce under United Nations auspices. The truce has continued to work well beyond its expiration six months ago.
Yemen’s civil war is a multipolar conflict (with regional and local components) rather than a two-sided conflict. Above all, it is the outcome of a corrupt central state that has become incapable of implementing the rule of law and reluctant to include diverse actors. The conflict has been depicted as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi-backed enemies. However, the Houthi-Saleh bloc, which is the country’s main military component, and the anti-Houthi bloc are both internally diverse and have opposing interests and agendas. Participants agreed that the anti-Houthi camp had little allegiance to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in practise.
Many pro-Houthi supporters are anti-Saudi rather than pro-Houthi.
According to Hans Grundberg, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen, Hudaydah is currently witnessing the longest stretch of relative peace since this destructive conflict. Ships carrying food, gasoline, and other commercial cargo are also arriving.
UN and other international organisations have failed to ensure aid reaches Yemenis in need. This failure is the worst international response to a humanitarian crisis in history.
As military operations in the Marib Governorate have increased to an unprecedented level, Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a fellow at the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies, warned that as the war spreads to other parts of Yemen and threatens the already tenuous prospects for peace, the war may also threaten the oil and gas fields there.
Reproductive health services, with an emphasis on emergency obstetric and neonatal care, with the goal of lowering mother death and morbidity. Services for women and girls to prevent and respond to various types of violence. The Rapid Response Mechanism provides emergency life-saving kits to all newly displaced people.
Impediments to Resolving the Crisis
The truce has continued to work despite a precarious military situation and severe economic and humanitarian challenges, and parties to the conflict are displaying a willingness to engage constructively. This underscores the need for a more comprehensive agreement and ongoing support from a coordinated, regional, and international community.
Yemenis and everyone else interested in their fate were extremely disappointed by instances of the truce’s collapse. However, Saudi Arabia is now primarily concerned with terminating its participation in the fight and is specifically searching for a mechanism to cease Houthi cross-border raids into its territory. The Houthis, for their part, continue to insist on having direct conversations with Saudi Arabia; in fact, formerly private meetings between them are now reinforced by talks that both parties openly acknowledge. These might be the beginning of a troublesome, imperfect, incomplete answer.
Nevertheless, the necessity for a genuine ceasefire is highlighted by the ongoing reports of violence throughout the frontlines. The difficulties facing the nation will get worse if parties don’t work together on crucial financial matters. The promise of a safe, stable future from an economic perspective can only be brought about by an open and thorough political process. In that sense, inclusion and the genuine involvement and representation of women and youth will be essential for guaranteeing the longevity of any political solution.
