Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. counter-Houthi military campaign in March and April 2025, had minimal effect on Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Not only have Houthis renewed strikes on civilian ships across the Bab el-Mandeb and missile strikes on Israel, but their Yemeni rivals remain largely idle and distracted by political conflict. While the Houthis continue to control Yemen’s capital Sana’a, Presidential Leadership Council members operate on survival mode as the economic crisis deepens, and instability grows across liberated provinces. Time is not on the Internationally Recognized Government’s side.
Without any constitutional framing, the Presidential Leadership Council’s primary source of conflict has been weak legal authority.
Three years after Saudi Arabia brokered the creation of the Presidential Leadership Council, rumors emerged in April of preparations for an 80,000-troop force to launch a ground offensive against the Houthis. While the November 2019 Riyadh Agreement initially envisioned this force, it never materialized because the rivals failed to bury differences and unite security and military forces against Houthis. Political disputes in the interim capital Aden, in Hadhramaut, Marib, Shabwah and Ta’iz have hindered hopes for any cohesive force to retake Sana’a since September 2014. Political parties share few interests and, while the status quo limits Houthis to territory they have occupied since early 2021, millions of Yemenis suffer without salaries and basic services.
Without any constitutional framing, the Presidential Leadership Council’s primary source of conflict has been weak legal authority for Chairman Rashad al-Alimi and seven other members: Aidarous al-Zubaidi, Tareq Saleh, Sultan al-Aradha, Abdullah al-Alimi Bawazir, Abd al-Rahman Abu Zara’a al-Muharrami, Othman Mujalli and Faraj al-Bahsani. The Council members represent the General People’s Congress, al-Islah and the Southern Transitional Council, a conglomerate reminiscent of the failed 1990 Unity regime.
The conflict with the Houthis is an existential threat for southerners, but not necessarily for some of the northern political groupings. The Houthis also present a challenge to the post-Republican order for the General People’s Congress and al-Islah. Conflict between the General People’s Congress and southerners, meanwhile, dates from the failed May 1990 Unity experiment, which culminated in the 1994 civil war, whose resolution in the northerners’ favor created a perception among southerners of a “forced unity,” in which the northerners would suppress their aspirations and exploit natural resources.
The conflict between the Southern Transitional Council and al-Islah, meanwhile, is multifaceted, colored by the legacy distrust of political Islam across the South, resentment over extremist fatwas against the South during the 1994 civil war and, most recently, oppressive policies through the term of the last Islah governor in Aden before start of the current armed conflict in March 2015. Further complicating matters are rivalries between religious factions, including Salafis. Southern Yemen traditionally has rejected political Islam, but the Southern Council acknowledges religion’s place in society, as well as the need for alliances with Salafi factions that oppose both Houthis and al-Islah.
Yemen’s neighbors are also reluctant to disrupt the status quo as Houthis threaten to strike their territories.
Each party within the Presidential Leadership Council sees its own survival as top priority. The lack of progress addressing the economic crisis illustrates both their inability to address basic needs across liberated areas and the unwillingness to risk political capital to relieve suffering of millions of Yemenis. To gather a significant force to push Houthis out of any province, parties would have to deploy forces from their territories and trust rivals will not recruit agitators to destabilize their strongholds. Yemen’s neighbors are also reluctant to disrupt the status quo as Houthis threaten to strike their territories. Absent shared interests, each party simply waits for others to weaken or fall while their own limited security role keeps them relevant.
Reform of the Presidential Leadership Council remains beyond the interests of its sponsors, with no mention even during United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York last month. Alternative proposals have also fallen short when addressing any of the root sources of conflict. Any hope for Western governments getting directly involved dissipates as conflict fatigue and their own domestic crises set in.
The future, then, does not look bright. Unless Yemeni leaders themselves find a path toward reconciling their differences or a recipe for cooperation toward re-establishing a central state, or federation, millions will continue to suffer as the international community turns their focus to other crises.
