Yemen’s Hidden War
“The coalition campaign in Yemen has devastating consequences for the U.S. counterterrorism strategy,” says April Longley Alley, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. “They can continue to whack-a-mole with drone strikes, but the threat has become much deeper and more complicated over the long term.”
Since the beginning of the war, Saudi Arabia has been preventing journalists from boarding the few humanitarian flights and ships it allows into Yemen, which is otherwise cut off from the world by the coalition blockade. I arrive in Djibouti in the hopes of finding a refugee or cargo boat that could take me there, but the news is bad. The Djiboutian government, I’m told, at the behest of the Saudi coalition, has recently started vetting even small commercial vessels. If my photographer and I want to get in by sea, we will have to find a smuggler willing to run the naval blockade in a speedboat.
The boat we find is 23 feet long and made of fiberglass, with a low, dagger-shaped hull, and looks a little flimsy for a 130-mile crossing of the Bab al Mandab strait. As we leave the port, an American military speedboat loops by to take a look at us, and my photographer and I slouch below the low gunwales. Once we are out to sea, our captain, whom I’ll call Yousuf, relaxes. Like many of the fishermen who plied the coastal waters of the Horn of Africa, he is used to taking unusual cargo. In past years, he has taken Ethiopian migrants, crammed in 30 or more at a time, on this route and deposited them clandestinely on the Yemeni shore, to continue their harrowing journey in search of work in the wealthy petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf. “They don’t know enough to be afraid,” he says.
Over the horizon to our starboard is the port of Aden, which had once been the capital of an independent South Yemen, before the nation was reunited in 1990 under Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh had been a key U.S. ally and had supported the drone program in return for aid, but he was toppled in 2011 by protests during the Arab Spring, by demonstrators who demanded the same things as those in Cairo and Damascus: an end to economic stagnation and corruption, and the unaccountable, repressive institutions that sustained the region’s strongmen.
For a moment, Yemen seemed like an Arab Spring success story. Saleh’s relatively peaceful departure was brokered by the U.N., Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council. In the aftermath of the agreement, Saleh’s vice president, Abdu Rabbu Mansur Hadi, ran unopposed for president and won. But the hopes of 2011 gradually faded as the country’s political elites dallied and squabbled in the capital, Sana’a. Under Hadi’s ineffectual reign, corruption and the economy worsened.