A fragile peace upended: chaos returns to Yemen

By James Hood

Amid the headline-grabbing clash of titans between Iran and the USA, a revival of a longstanding regional conflict in the Middle East is beginning to become increasingly apparent to the world. The Middle East, with its vital strategic shipping routes and export of globally indispensable resources, rarely sees a conflict without reverberations across the world. This time in Yemen, it's no different. 

The setting of these concerns, Yemen, is a large nation on the Arabian Peninsula, straddling the southern border of Saudi Arabia and possessing unrivalled access along its west coast to the Red Sea, and vitally, the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint, a small strait between the Red Sea and wider access to Asia. A chokepoint that transports 12% of global maritime trade. Therefore, it should be no surprise to observers that fighting between Houthi rebels and internationally recognised government forces along the western region of Yemen that can control maritime access to this chokepoint has raised international fears of another Hormuz-esque logistical crisis. 

These well-placed fears first arose in 2014, when civil war broke out in Yemen. The Houthis, an Iranian-backed Shia militia with significant support, took vast swathes of Northwestern Yemen in a lightning offensive, including the capital city, Sanaa. What followed over the next 8 years was a series of increasingly escalatory interventions that widened this regional power grapple into a showdown between two rival states in the region.

The Sunni state of Saudi Arabia, long engaged in the midst of a proxy war with the rival Shia regime of Iran and sharing an expansive border with northern Yemen, saw the power clasp of the Houthis as losing a useful strategic ally in the peninsula. The political climate was deeply combustible for regional involvement from the major powers, and the decision by Saudi Arabia in 2015 to launch a major intervention through the means of expansive airstrikes on Houthi targets was the flame that was inevitably going to set the nation alight. 

From 2015 to 2022, Yemen was home to laborious attritional conflict rooted firmly in a multi-causal fusion of events that led to anarchy. The Shia-Sunni divide, Iranian-Saudi proxy entanglements and regional powers consolidating access to the Red Sea. All these broad issues were much grander in geopolitical breadth than the day-to-day living conditions of the Yemeni people. 

And tragically, but unsurprising nonetheless, the hardest hit were the very people Saudi intervention in support of the government forces were claiming to be protecting. 

Throughout the stalemate of the war, which saw Houthi consolidations around the Northwest coast of Yemen after being pushed back from the government's temporary capital of Aden by Saudi-led airstrikes and allied Yemeni troops,access to food, water, and medical care in provinces near the front line became severely limited. Inevitably, this developed into a concurrent human crisis alongside the chaos on the battlefield. 

Geopolitical strategy was triumphing over humanitarianism once again.  

The situation became so dire that in 2019, the UN declared Yemen to be the "world's worst humanitarian crisis”. But importantly, the sporadic and unorganised military activity was identified as the driver of the dire living conditions in Yemen’s coastal provinces, but not in a conventional manner. The UN estimated 60% of the casualties recorded in the conflict were indirect results of the living conditions that the Saudi airstrikes and blockade resultedin, a bruising rebuttal of the cost of Saudi intervention in support of government forces, which itself became the root cause of material suffering for the southern Yemeni population. 

Yet, even the military bureaucracy of Saudi Arabia and Iran could no longer justify the humanitarian plight as justifying their ends in the conflict by 2022, when a UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect in April 2022. At least temporarily, humanitarianism came back into focus rather than strategic geopolitics and ideological imperatives.

For 4 years, the truce held sporadically and a distinctly lower level of intra-Yemeni violence between the two warring coalitions could be observed. 

A major destabilising force regarding peace in Yemen revealed itself in February 2026. That force lay in the breakout of an all-out war between the United States and Iran. Crucially, the Saudis were facilitating US operations and the foundations were laid for the Houthis, an Iranian proxy, to enter the conflict.

Relative peace persisted in Yemen until September 2026, when, amid gridlock in the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis realised their vast strategic leverage over the Bab el-Mandeb strait and its ability to inflict chaos on Saudi and American interests. 

Geopolitical strategy was triumphing over humanitarianism once again. 

The past weeks have seen the Houthis launch a revival of active warfare in Western Yemen in a lightning offensive that saw them capture the port town of Mocha, overlooking the Bab-el Mandeb strait. Despite recent proclamations of a major government offensive to counter these gains, announced with Saudi support, the vulnerability of Yemen remains stark, and evidence suggests the wider strategic backdrop favours reactionary elements of the Houthis. 

The balance remains concerningly ambiguous. Will the Houthis rediscover their momentum seen in September? Or will the Yemeni government quash this temporary hiatus in hostilities and restore stability to the region vital as a logistical alternative to the Strait of Hormuz? 

Yet one thing is painfully clear: humanitarian conditions are fragile as they stand; the city at the heart of the recent fighting, Taiz, is at risk of running out of wheat and flour within weeks. Saudi Arabia and all Yemeni forces involved cannot risk escalation for the sake of bolstering wider regional hostilities, or chaos will have truly returned to Yemen. 

Image: UN OCHA / Flickr