A swath of green runs through the city of Taiz, in Yemen’s southwestern highlands. From one of the craggy hills surrounding it, the strip resembles an urban planner’s modest attempt at a park. Close-up you can see that the beige of concrete blocks is split by tangles of trees and bushes sprouting from shell-pocked streets: this is no-man’s-land, nature reclaiming a place that has become too deadly for human life.
“The destroyed building there—that’s the beginning of the front line,” Abdulmalek al-Rabadi, a United Nations official who has worked to get humanitarian aid into the city, told me when I last visited a few years ago. We were looking down from an apartment block whose sides had been blown out by rocket fire, at territory controlled by the rebel group known as the Houthis. We had been told not to point, lest our gestures attract a sniper’s bullets. “Nobody is living there,” he said.
Taiz is spread over a basin encircled by hills that each side in Yemen’s decade-old civil war has fought for, lost, recaptured, and lost again. The city has been divided since April 2015, split by a front line that separates the Houthi rebels in the north from a rabble of militias, brigades, and armed groups in the south; most of the competing parties have, at one stage or another, tried to choke the routes bringing supplies into Taiz. The siege is now the lengthiest in modern history: more than twenty times longer than Stalingrad’s, three times longer than Sarajevo’s, longer than even the siege of Troy by more than a year.
Since 2014, after the Houthis seized power and Saudi Arabia responded with air strikes, Yemen has been pounded into near oblivion by warring factions. Iran has strengthened its support for the Houthis, while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have armed and enabled a crew of militias that occasionally masquerade as an “internationally recognized government” and just as frequently fight one another for territory. Figures are hard to come by, but in 2018 Save the Children estimated that some 85,000 children under five had starved to death in the conflict, and in 2021 the UN projected that around 154,000 people would have been killed in the fighting and some 223,000 would have died from famine and preventable diseases such as cholera and diphtheria if the war continued through the end of that year. It has gone on for almost five more years. The real toll of this war is likely much higher, but there are no updated and authoritative nationwide assessments because the systems for counting deaths no longer exist.
Though Saudi Arabia and the UAE are nominally allies, their interests in Yemen are at cross-purposes, and since the beginning of the war they have supported different proxies with different aims. (It is unacceptable to the Saudis, for instance, that Emirati-backed groups have joined in southern Yemen’s efforts to secede from the north, while the Emiratis have often been irked by Saudi backing for groups that are seen to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood and other political Islamists.) Last winter the UAE-supported Southern Transitional Council (STC), a coalition of political groups and militias, seized power in the south. Saudi-backed militias—including a new one called Nation Shield, which was formed specifically to oppose the STC—then counterattacked, taking over border security in vital sea- and airports. In late December Saudi forces bombed an Emirati shipment of arms they alleged was headed to the STC. The Emiratis then withdrew from the country, and the STC, one of the most effective anti-Houthi forces, was sidelined.
The Houthis watched the fallout from the mountainous north and plotted their next move. Since the first months of Israel’s assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, the group has periodically launched long-range missiles and drones at Israel. It has also held Red Sea shipping for ransom in the name of the Palestinian cause, provoking bombardments by the US, the United Kingdom, and Israel. When the US and Israel went to war in Iran earlier this year, the Houthis struck a deal not to attack US ships on the Red Sea. (They did, however, bomb Israel in support of their allies in Iran.)
Yemen is both blessed and cursed by geography. The Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which separates Yemen from East Africa, is a crucial choke point for global shipping, lying on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz. In 2015 the Houthis managed to control the strait for a while until an Emirati-backed offensive pushed them back up the coast and established a fiefdom there for Tareq Saleh, a nephew of Yemen’s late authoritarian dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. His control lasted until this September, when the Houthis surged out of their mountain strongholds and launched a lightning advance down the western coast. By September 11 they had seized the city of Mokha and effectively taken control of the Yemeni flank of the strait, a huge stretch of territory from which the group now has the ability to target international shipping. As of this writing Saudi and Yemeni forces claim to have retaken several crucial areas around the strait; the Houthis deny losing the territory. By late September, meanwhile, the Houthis had resumed their assault on Taiz with waves of attacks. The renewed fighting has killed hundreds and accelerated a spiral of misery that, for Yemen’s civilians, seems to have no end in sight.
Until the recent Houthi offensive, the contours of Yemen’s conflict had remained frozen for about a decade. The underlying divisions, for that matter, existed well before the current war. In 1918 the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, in the north of the country, became independent amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and it was ruled by an imam from Sanaa, the capital. The south was controlled by the British from their colony in Aden, a major port since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, via a patchwork of London-aligned emirates.
The 1960s was a time of conflict in both the north and the south. In 1962 a coup unseated the imam in Sanaa, and a brutal civil war pitted Egyptian-backed republican forces against Saudi- and British-backed insurgents who supported the deposed monarch.1 So effective were the imam’s guerrillas (many of whom were drawn from the same Zaydi tribal communities of the northern highlands that today form the Houthis’ base) that Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s fiercely anticolonialist president, lamented to the US ambassador that Yemen had become his “Vietnam.”
As the war in the north wound down, the southern Yemenis won their independence from Great Britain and created the socialist state of South Yemen, which existed from 1967 until 1990, when Yemen was unified under Ali Abdullah Saleh. If you look at a map today, the Houthi-controlled areas broadly match the old boundaries of North Yemen.
In the years since, the US has taken over from Great Britain as Yemen’s Western meddler-in-chief. The Yemen Model, by the RAND Corporation political scientist Alexandra Stark, gives an unusually clear-eyed appraisal of how decades of US policy created the conditions for a war that destroyed the state it was supposed to strengthen. The book scrutinizes the strategy of the George W. Bush administration, which propped up Saleh’s dictatorship. In exchange Saleh gave wide latitude to US special forces as they launched missions to eliminate members of al-Qaeda, which had taken root in Yemen in the 1990s.
Funding for this campaign came from a new piece of legislation enacted in 2005 as part of a National Defense Authorization Act, which allowed the Defense Department broad leeway to bankroll “train-and-equip” missions for counterterrorism without much congressional oversight. Over the next decade some $400 million would be spent this way in Yemen. But what looked like a low-touch way to deal with terrorism in reality funneled dollars to unreliable partners.
In the mid-2000s a militia connected to the northern al-Houthi family—inspired by a religious revival movement and enraged by what its members saw as encroachment on their traditional land by Sunni Yemenis returning to the country after migrating to other parts of the Middle East—decided to take up arms against Saleh. The group was made up of Zaydi Shia Muslims,2 and it drew inspiration from Iran’s Shia revolutionaries. (Saleh himself was also a Zaydi but not strictly sectarian: some powerful figures in his government were Sunni.) For Saleh this group—which called itself Ansar Allah, the Partisans of God, but soon became known as the Houthis—was the perfect boogeyman, and he requested yet more resources to fight it. Proponents of this counterterrorism strategy, Stark writes, ignored the “moral hazard” it created: Saleh’s government was incentivized not to end terrorism but to perpetuate it in order to continue receiving American aid.
After Barack Obama, who had promised to reduce American involvement in the Middle East, took office, his national security team lauded what had become known in Washington circles as the “Yemen model”—a “lighter-footprint approach,” Stark writes, of launching drone strikes against terror groups using what one official called “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting.” To do so, the US was willing to work with the brutal and corrupt Yemeni army and even, as a former intelligence translator once told me in Aden, with Russian troops. It also grossly understated the number of civilians its strikes killed, including by counting “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,” according to The New York Times.3 As Stark points out, each civilian death had the effect of radicalizing Yemenis against both the US and their own government. In 2009 al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi factions merged to form a more potent and dangerous group.
But all the aid in the world couldn’t quell popular discontent with Saleh, who was forced out of power in late 2011 by a diverse coalition that included student activists alongside rebels like the Houthis. A hopeful period followed, during which Yemenis from many walks of life, including Houthis and southern separatists as well as women’s organizations and civil society groups, met at the Mövenpick Hotel in Sanaa for the National Dialogue Conference. In early 2014 most of the groups agreed on a road map for a new constitution, but the Houthis rejected some of its provisions, especially a new redistricting scheme that would have deprived them of access to the sea. They stormed into Sanaa later in 2014.
The Saudis feared the presence of what they saw as an Iranian proxy on their southern border, and a Saudi-led coalition that included the UAE began bombing Yemen in 2015. “While the ‘Yemen model’ of counterterrorism was initially held up as a success,” Stark writes, “it failed to foresee, let alone help prevent, the outbreak of the war.”
In the spring of 2015 the Houthis swept south from Sanaa toward Aden. Their violent advance into the city left rows of apartments, factories, and villas gutted by bombs. Many of these ruins now house the city’s enormous population of displaced people. The latest UN estimate puts their number at around 280,000 in the city and its immediate surroundings—around a quarter of the area’s population. Like Saleh, the Houthis justified their assaults by saying they were carrying out counterterrorism operations, including against regional ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates.
Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia expressed interest in countering Iran, but it became clear that their interventions had another purpose: cementing their own dominance in the Middle East. Both operated through proxies. In government-controlled areas of Yemen, the Saudis used the Islah Party, connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance their goals. Prominent voices in Riyadh even broached the idea of building a canal through the deserts of southern Saudi Arabia and eastern Yemen that would bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The UAE’s preferred proxy in the south was the STC, which often clashed with Islah and other Saudi-backed groups. Dubai had long advocated a less aggressive, commercially driven approach, whereas Abu Dhabi’s crown prince at the time, Mohamed bin Zayed, advocated a more muscular foreign policy in which the Emirates used force to expand a network of strategic bases around the Red Sea and North Africa. Ultimately the latter plan won out, and the UAE attempted to build its own regional empire.4
Stark has a good section spelling out how power in the Emirates shifted in 2008, when Abu Dhabi bailed out Dubai during the global financial crisis, but much of the rest of her account focuses on Saudi Arabia. She sees the Emirates as having been primarily engaged in “threat prevention” in Yemen, which risks understating the extent of the country’s involvement: the UAE has launched most of the ground missions that have managed to wrest territory from the Houthis (some of which deployed fighters connected with the genocidal Janjaweed militia in Sudan), and its ambitions have often run counter to Riyadh’s, including on the strategic Yemeni archipelago of Socotra, where the UAE sought to strengthen its control over the approaches to the Red Sea.
Faced with this complex tangle of overlapping wars and regional rivalries, the Obama administration found itself torn between consideration for human rights, the US’s relationship with its allies in the Gulf, and the nuclear deal it was then negotiating with Iran. But it soon backed the Saudi-led intervention. The Obama White House provided aerial refueling and weapons sales to the Saudis; it withdrew precision-guided missile sales to the coalition attacking Yemen only long after it became clear that the strikes were killing and maiming large numbers of civilians and appeared to be directly targeting civilian infrastructure. (It did not, however, withdraw its wider backing of Saudi Arabia.) “There’s an American imprint on every civilian life lost in Yemen,” Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat and one of Congress’s most consistent opponents of the war, said on television in 2016. “Though the Saudis are actually dropping the bombs from their planes, they wouldn’t be able to do it without us.”
When Donald Trump came to power in 2017, his administration exhibited a total lack of concern for human rights in Yemen. During a visit to Saudi Arabia that year, Trump jumped at the prospect of working with the Saudis, strengthening intelligence sharing and making a purported $110 billion arms deal with Riyadh. (The $110 billion appears to have been an aspirational figure—the Saudi armed forces ordered only a fraction of that amount.) Trump’s maximally permissive attitude toward the Saudis revealed a deeper truth about the US’s relationship to Yemen, one that explains the catastrophic failure of its intervention there: US policymakers never put concern for real Yemenis at the center of their decision-making. Instead Washington has chosen to support a rogues’ gallery of allies fighting the Houthis, even as evidence mounted that most of them were seeking to prolong the conflict for personal gain.
The Houthis, who had until 2015 been a regional militia, were one of the parties that would rather fight to the death than cede control; their leaders, after all, had prospered only during times of fighting. In Sanaa, a city of brick and white gypsum towers, they built a regime enforced by cruelty and torture, swiftly turning into the oppressors they had once fought against.5 They financed it with billions of dollars from the smuggling of weapons, fuel, and narcotics, and they began to build an alternative economy in which their favored companies received special access to licenses, tax exemptions, and contracts. Those who dared question the Houthi order were targeted. In 2017 the Houthis arrested the journalist Hisham al-Omeisy in Sanaa after he reported on property seizures and forced displacement. He was placed in solitary confinement and, he told me, thrown into a dungeon. (The detentions and abuse continue today: in December the Houthis seized ten UN staffers and accused them of espionage—charges that the UN denies—and since May 2024 they have arrested dozens of Yemeni aid and civil society workers.)
All sides have inflicted cruelty. The Saudis bombed Yemen’s infrastructure so badly that mass starvation and epidemics ensued. Meanwhile, as BuzzFeed News reported in 2018, the Emiratis paid mercenaries to conduct targeted assassinations of politicians they deemed insufficiently friendly to their cause. In Aden in 2020 I watched as men in balaclavas jumped from a machine gun–mounted STC truck, pulled two young men from a nearby car, tied them up, and threw them in the vehicle. “They’re a counterterrorism unit,” my driver said. “They wear the masks because they arrest al-Qaeda members, and they could get targeted at home.”
By the time I visited Taiz in December of that year, the consequences of more than five years of war were obvious, both in the deepening humanitarian crisis and in the Houthis’ entrenchment. At the al-Rahma school, lessons continued as Houthi mortar fire struck nearby. At one of the hospitals, an explosive landed in the middle of an operating theater. An eleven-year-old boy named Mohammad Gamil showed me the web of cuts and discolored flesh on his leg: he had been hit by a stray mortar round the year before. “My left leg was cut to shreds,” he said. “It still hurts. As I grow, my left leg stays the same size, and my right leg gets longer.”
Waseem, a twenty-two-year-old fighter who belonged to an anti-Houthi militia, told me that the Houthis were initially “cocky because of their numbers and weapons” but eventually started deploying child soldiers as their regular troops suffered casualties. “We were fighting children, eleven to fifteen years old,” he said. “I thought such things only happened in Africa.”
As the violence raged on, the UAE and its STC proxy consolidated control in the south, leading to allegations from Yemeni civil society that the Emiratis were trying to split the country in two for their own benefit. There was almost no threat of a Houthi takeover on Socotra, but in April 2018 more than a hundred UAE troops landed at Socotra Airport with tanks, artillery, and armored vehicles. (The governor of the islands, Ramzi Mahrous, denounced what he called an Emirati “invasion.”) STC forces arrived on the islands in 2020, seized power, and sent Mahrous into exile. The STC and its supporters were keen to describe this action as essential for regional security.6 But most people saw it for what it was: an out-and-out power grab.
When I traveled to Socotra in 2023, Emirati military vehicles loomed outside the airport, and graffiti by the highway extolled a return to the Mahra Sultanate, a royal statelet that for hundreds of years comprised Socotra and a chunk of mainland Yemen. Tourist flights had resumed from Abu Dhabi, and visitors were crowding on to see Socotra’s unique biodiversity. A man who had been wounded in fighting on the mainland told me he was grateful to the Emiratis for giving him a house on Socotra—one of a swath of new prefab constructions.
During my visit to the islands a pilot told me he had flown with an Emirati intelligence officer to inspect a site where the UAE was building an airstrip on the remote island of Abd al-Kuri. Emirati government sources claimed that their presence on Socotra was philanthropic.7 But early last year the Associated Press released satellite imagery that showed the construction of the base that the pilot had told me about, next to piles of dirt that spelled out “I Love UAE.” Combining it with a necklace of other Emirati bases around the Horn of Africa, analysts have posited that the airfield at Abd al-Kuri was meant to help the UAE project its power over the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Such infrastructure is also useful for transporting goods like gold, which Emirati traders increasingly import from parts of East and Central Africa, where the proceeds often fuel conflicts like Sudan’s civil war.
The STC ran Aden when I visited in 2020, and though gangsterism prevailed there was at least a greater sense of calm and normality than in other Yemeni cities. “We have shown in Aden that we can manage things well ourselves,” Lutfi Shatara, a founding member of the STC, told me. He was overstating the case: by 2025 the public services in the city had fallen into such disrepair that there were up to twenty hours of power outages a day, water ran only intermittently, and fuel shipments were few and far between. “We are being consumed slowly,” one resident told Murad Abdo, a journalist for the Xinhua News Agency, “as if life itself were punishing us for staying alive.”
Many of those who have fled the country’s violence have ended up in Aden. Mansour and Afrah, two of the displaced people I met there, lived with their eight children in a cinder block shack on the outskirts of town, in an area crowded with others like them. They came from the Red Sea port of Hudaydah, where “the Houthi rebels would use us as human shields and use our homes as bases from which to shoot,” Afrah told me. They said that they had no work and nothing to eat and that their children didn’t go to school. “These days I can only pick up plastic bottles and sell them for recycling,” Mansour said. They had to scrounge for restaurant leftovers. “Most days my children go hungry.”
As damaged as they are, Aden and its port are still major prizes for the belligerents in Yemen’s war. In December of last year the STC overreached and seized all eight southern governorates. In response Saudi Arabia demanded that the group leave the region entirely, and the Emirates, fearing a larger conflict, helped the leader of the STC flee to Abu Dhabi. On Socotra, too, Emirati soldiers packed up and left this past January. “Everything, all that was related to the UAE activities—nothing is left on the island,” a Socotra local told me recently. Flights now arrive from the Saudi Arabian Red Sea port city of Jeddah, not Abu Dhabi. The local said that he did not know whether the Abd al-Kuri airfield had been deserted as well: “Nobody knows what is going on.”
By early January the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council had taken over Aden, and the STC had officially disbanded, although it is hard to imagine that the well-armed and organized southern independence movement will simply give up on a dream that its members have nurtured for the past three decades. Whether under UAE or Saudi control, Aden’s future looks bleak. After eleven years of war, the ragged south of Yemen is a shattered vassal state, with scant consideration given to the lives of its residents.
The same could be said of the rest of the country, where foreign intervention—be it by Western powers, the Saudi-led coalition, or the Iranians—has unleashed violence that no one has been able to contain. When Joe Biden took office, he tried diplomacy. Timothy A. Lenderking, Biden’s envoy for Yemen, said that he “aggressively” used back channels to negotiate with the Houthis. As Stark points out in her book, this was the period with the most engagement from Washington to end the war, and she even allows a hopeful note to creep into her final pages—the book ends in 2023, before Trump’s second term.
Although Lenderking’s approach did manage to temporarily reduce violence and open corridors for aid, the conflict continued, and the humanitarian crisis deepened. During Biden’s presidency, Congress approved some $10 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. In late 2023, meanwhile, the Houthis began to lob missiles at Israel and target tankers steaming through the Red Sea in retaliation, they said, for the assault on Gaza. Biden responded with missile strikes on Houthi targets.
Reading Stark reminded me that Yemen has long frustrated the expectations of all its would-be rulers, foreign or domestic. In the early days of the war the Saudi government promised the Obama administration that it would be over “in six weeks,” a promise that US State Department officials parroted at briefings with journalists. (I heard this from government sources countless times in the early days of Yemen’s conflict.) More than a decade later the fighting continues, and Saudi Arabia has little to show for it. Arming brutal proxies, as all the major external actors in the conflict have done, has hardly improved anyone’s security—not Saudi Arabia’s or the UAE’s, not the US’s or Iran’s, and certainly not Yemen’s. Since the war began the Houthis have developed from a rural militia into a group that has the capacity to attack civilian and military infrastructure across the region, from Israel to Jeddah to the vital oil fields of Abqaiq in eastern Saudi Arabia. Policymakers in Washington have observed the war’s downward spiral but been hesitant to rein in important Gulf allies, prompting Stark to ask, “What is the point of having leverage with US security partners if we do not use it?”
Anyone who, like Stark, has studied the country for many years believes that the answer to Yemen’s woes is not more bombs, bullets, and death but diplomacy, which would mean returning to the dialogue process that began after Saleh’s fall, diffusing tensions and taking the concerns of all sides seriously. As the US returns to adventurism across the Middle East under Trump, it is all too obvious that Washington has not learned this lesson. Neither have the rest of the Arab states that have sought to intervene. After Trump took office in 2025, the US launched a two-month series of air strikes against the Houthis code-named Operation Rough Rider. When the Houthis agreed not to attack shipping, Trump granted them some reprieve. Reports from mid-September indicate that the US Air Force was moments from bombing the group before Trump called it off, apparently concerned about opening another front in the Middle East as his unpopular war with Iran drags on.
Burned by the Saudi intervention earlier this year, Emirati proxies, including the remnants of the STC, are not participating in the renewed battle with the Houthis. (Some analysts have even accused the group of indirectly helping the Houthis through inaction.) The Saudi and Yemeni forces are now attempting to dislodge the Houthis on their own—a task at which they previously failed even with help from numerous allies. In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency last month, Saudi Arabia’s highest-ranking cleric, the grand mufti Sheikh Saleh bin Fawzan al-Fawzan, said that the country’s soldiers fighting in Yemen were “following in the footsteps of the Prophet’s companions.” The mufti is state appointed, and analysts interpreted the move as buttressing support for a wider war, but it’s worth wondering whether Saudi Arabia still has a real objective for attacking Yemen beyond maintaining the status quo.
The Houthis, on their end, are doing as well as they ever have. In mid-September they conducted a huge missile barrage on Riyadh as well as on Saudi oil facilities. “The two operations, by the grace of God Almighty, were successful,” their spokesman reported, “and resulted in large fires breaking out at the targeted sites.” Now they will regroup and concentrate on taking more territory. Most analysts agree that, absent a resurgence of the STC or concerted US strikes on the Houthis, it will take months to dislodge them from their fortified positions.
As always the Yemeni people suffer the most. Over 112,000 people have fled since the Houthi advances of early September, swelling the numbers of the country’s 4.8 million displaced. The situation, the UN says, is getting worse by the hour. And yet there seems to be less international will than ever to pursue the diplomatic channels that offer the best chance of rescuing Yemen from more bombs, violence, and misery.
—October 7, 2026