A country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen imports 90% of its food. Its biggest port is Hodeidah. The country once exported more than 100,000 barrels of crude a day; most of its oil and gas resources are in the south.
The Houthis, an Iranian-backed Shia militia, seized the capital Sana'a in 2014. Saudi Arabia began an air campaign against them in 2015. A decade of air strikes has crippled infrastructure. Some 25m Yemenis live under Houthi control. The internationally recognised government has been unable to return to the capital.
The Houthis control most of Yemen's west, home to three-quarters of the population. None of Yemen's other forces can match them; their force has grown 12-fold to 350,000 since 2015, according to the UN. They tax heavily but show scant interest in service delivery, instead focusing on indoctrinating the population with religious dogma. They practise forced conscription and use child soldiers.
A UN-brokered ceasefire between the kingdom and the Houthis has largely held for almost four years: the militia has not attacked Saudi cities since 2022. But a full deal to end the war has proved elusive, largely because of Houthi intransigence—whenever the Saudis offer a concession, the militia pockets it and demands more. In 2014 the Houthis marched out of their stronghold in the country's north; the next year Saudi Arabia assembled an Arab coalition to beat them back, but it quickly sank into a quagmire.
Since October 7th 2023 the Houthis fired missiles and drones at Israel and attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea, a show of solidarity with Palestinians that also proved a useful distraction from domestic misrule. Donald Trump ordered a seven-week bombing campaign against the Houthis in early 2025, and declared Saudi Arabia a major non-NATO ally.
The anti-Houthi camp has always been fractious. The Saudis were willing to work with Islah, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, while the United Arab Emirates, which abhors political Islam, preferred partners such as the Southern Transitional Council (STC) and Tareq Saleh, a nephew of Yemen's late longtime dictator.
In 2022 the Saudis abruptly sacked Yemen's president and replaced him with an eight-man Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). Its leader, Rashad al-Alimi, is a Saudi-backed politician who favours national unity. His deputy, Aiderus al-Zubaidi, is the head of the STC and prefers to partition the country.
South Yemen was an independent state from 1967 to 1990. In December 2025 the STC, secessionists backed by the UAE, went on a lightning offensive across the south-east, seizing territory held by Saudi-backed factions. The STC now controls the eight governorates that made up the former South Yemen, including most of Yemen's oil and gas resources. Saudi Arabia forced the STC to retreat and expelled the UAE from Yemen. On December 30th 2025 the UAE said it would withdraw its troops after Saudi Arabia backed the Yemeni government's demand for their departure, though the UAE made no announcement about a pullback by the STC itself. The power grab deepened a rift between the two Gulf powers, already at odds in Sudan and elsewhere; Saudi Arabia subsequently bombed an Emirati weapons shipment in Yemen.
A 2022 Houthi drone strike killed three people in Abu Dhabi. But the UAE is more distant from the conflict than Saudi Arabia, which shares a long border with Yemen. Whereas the Saudis want a stable Yemen that does not shoot at them, the Emiratis see it as part of a broader strategy to exert influence in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
Your ignorance cramps my conversation.