‘Allah is Greater, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory for Islam. ”
So goes the slogan of the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Houthis – officially Ansar Allah, or “supporters of God” – were formed in the 1990s by US and Saudi intervention in the country, and have been at war with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government since 2014. Sana’a, the capital since 2015, and today there are 80 percent of the country’s population.
The Houthis claim to be fighting for a republic that will protect the rights and interests of the Yemeni people; A spokesman once stated that ‘Ansar Allah supports the establishment of a civilian state in Yemen. We want to build a striving for modern democracy. “From our slogan, another spokesman explained: ‘We do not really want anyone dead. The slogan is simply against the interference of those [American and Israeli] governments. ”
But their actions tell a very different story. The group is known for firing uninhabited firearms into populated neighborhoods in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which has supported the Yemeni government and is responsible for a host of abuses in the course of the conflict. Arbitrary detention, forced disappearance and torture were all an important part of the Houthi playbook, and journalists, human rights activists and religious minorities were the most common victims. Harassment and persecution by the Houthis and their allies led to the near extinction of the small Yemeni Jewish community; some of the members fled while others were forced to leave. Yemeni Bahá’ís have been arrested and convicted on charges of apostasy. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi movement, called them “satanic”, and like the Jews they were expelled from the country. And while both sides of the Yemeni civil war employed children, Human Rights Watch notes that about two-thirds of the child soldiers in the conflict fought for the Houthis, some as young as eleven years old.
It is true that the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis is guilty of its own serious human rights violations. No party is innocent in this conflict, which has had devastating consequences: according to the United Nations, 24 million people need humanitarian aid in the war-torn country, half of whom are children, and 233,000 people have died since the war. started in 2014 in earnest. In addition, there are legitimate debates over whether the United States should be involved in it at all, and if so, to what extent. Even some Republicans have quarreled with the Trump administration over its support for the Saudis, which came in the form of attempts to sell weapons.
However, the Houthis record clearly justifies the decision of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to appoint them as a foreign terrorist organization last month, and none of the legitimate concerns about US involvement in Yemen’s civil war excuse the step of the government of Biden to revoke the designation.
In a speech to the State Department last Thursday, Biden indicated a less practical approach to the conflict. “We end all US support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales,” he announced. An anonymous administration official confirmed that this would also mean that we would end an arrangement on the sharing of intelligence with Saudi Arabia over the war in Yemen. “
Given the dynamics of Yemen’s civil war, the attitude of the new president is not entirely unjustifiable. US support for the Saudi-led coalition represents an accountability to its image as a moral leader, and much more importantly to the merits of the image. But it can also not be denied that one side of the war will eventually triumph, and that the US and its allies in the region have a strong interest in ensuring that the Houthi are defeated. The fact that Iran, which senior fellow Mike Hudson Institute calls “giving the Red Sea a seat and access to the Suez Canal” is a recipe for regional instability. In addition, the Yemeni people will be better off if the Saudi coalition wins, as a Houthi victory is likely to provoke conflict in the long run and inflict more suffering on the population.
If the question of American involvement is set aside, Biden’s decision is to withdraw the designation of foreign terrorists that Pompeo placed on the Houthis. Based on their attacks on civilian targets in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the Houthis naturally qualify as a terrorist group, and it’s worth mentioning what they are.
Within the institution of foreign policy that is largely at institutions such as the New York Times and the UN, the Trump administration’s decision to do so, was immediately punished as a horrific mistake that would have dire humanitarian consequences. The Times announced that the designation would exacerbate the devastation of Yemen’s ongoing famine “but certainly, while insisting that‘ it is not clear how [it] will inhibit the Houthi rebels. ”
The former indictment, based on the allegation that the term ‘humanitarian efforts to donate food and medicine to Houthi-controlled areas in northern and western Yemen’, will come as a surprise, as the Trump administration announced humanitarian solutions in its statement of intent:
The US Treasury Department is prepared to grant licenses under its authority and corresponding guidance related to the official activities of the US Government in Yemen, including aid programming which is still the largest of any donor and the official activities of certain international organizations such as the United Nations.
It should come as no surprise that the US, the largest provider of humanitarian aid to Yemen in 2020, would move to ensure that the designation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist group did not stop the provision of such aid. But for those trying to take pressure off the Houthis as part of an effort to push the US into Iran and reintroduce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the humanitarian argument was an easy excuse.
As for the idea that it is not clear how the designation will hinder the Houthis, why do not the group is “cut off from financial support and other material resources managed by US banks or other US institutions”, such as the Times post it? Although the group’s largest source of support, Iran, outside the US financial system, access to the system could not officially be harmed. And as the Foreign Ministry’s page on foreign terrorist organizations makes clear, the term ‘supports our efforts to limit terrorist financing and encourage other countries to do the same’ by raising global awareness of the problem and send a clear message to our friends. as well as enemies over the US position.
The fact that they do not want to call the Houthis what they are – Iran – backed terrorists have no purpose other than to advance the Biden government’s untouched Middle East agenda. The balance between the principle and the right-wing politics in foreign policy is hard work. In the case of the Yemeni civil war, it is doubly so. But President Biden’s withdrawal from the Trump administration’s appointment is strategically as well as morally indefensible.