Saudi aircraft have now bombed South Yemeni forces more than 100 times following the extension of South Yemeni control to the Hadramawt and Mahra provinces. The Saudi government is upset that Southern Forces defeated Muslim Brotherhood and tribal groups to consolidate full, coherent political control over South Yemen.
Rather than celebrate a milestone that marginalizes the Houthis and prevents the resurgence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia attacks the only viable counter-terrorism force in the country.
For Saudi Arabia to focus more on killing counter-terror forces than on targeting Houthis raises real questions about the Kingdom’s orientation and responsibility.
For this alone, Washington and regional states should question whether Saudi Arabia is an asset in the war against terror or a liability. There is ample evidence that Islah, Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood faction, was complicit in assassinations, bombings, and complicit with smuggling to both the Houthis and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While in theory it was a member in good standing of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, in reality, it is a Trojan Horse, akin to including the Ku Klux Klan in an umbrella group of civil rights organizations.
For Saudi Arabia to focus more on killing counter-terror forces than on targeting Houthis raises real questions about the Kingdom’s orientation and responsibility. Saudi authorities are right to be upset with the United States. When the Houthis were launching hundreds of missiles and drones across Saudi Arabia, President Barack Obama and his top aides were finger-wagging at Riyadh, lecturing about human rights, and handwringing about the accuracy of Saudi bombing. If the U.S. government and humanitarian complaint was collateral damage due to Saudi bombing of the Houthis, then the response by Obama’s team was bizarre: They rolled back intelligence sharing to express Washington’s displeasure, a choice that made precision bombing even more difficult. And while Obama’s progressive base may have been upset with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s alleged order to murder former intelligence officer-turned-journalist and Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi, objectively the human rights record of the Houthis was far worse. Yemenis feared Houthi checkpoints for the arbitrariness of their shakedowns, the violence of their abuse, the extortion and theft in which they would engage, and the likelihood that any resistance could end in summary execution.
It is one thing for Riyadh to distrust Washington; it is another thing to become the Houthis’ third greatest ally after the Islamic Republic of Iran and Sultanate of Oman. Saudi Arabia today acts less like an international partner committed to ending the Houthi threat and more a shield for terror, if not its direct sponsor.
Mohammed bin Salman will not acknowledge this openly. Rather, Saudi Arabia hides behind the fiction that Rashad Al-Alimi, the nominal chair of the externally-appointed Presidential Leadership Council, requested Saudi assistance. Al-Alimi might be a nice man. He also has experience, both as a former minister of interior and advisor to late President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a man who also cynically defected to the Houthis in pursuit of his own personal power.
No legitimate president would sign off on Saudi airstrikes against fellow Yemeni government members.
Still, as president, Al-Alimi is a fraud. First, he lives in Riyadh and seldom visits the country he claims to lead. He controls no territory. His only constituents are the Saudi intelligence officers who instruct him. That Saudi Arabia justifies its attacks on a request by Al-Alimi presents Al-Alimi with a choice: Show himself a Yemeni patriot and resign or acknowledge that he is a Saudi stooge, less a president than a would-be colonial governor. No legitimate president would sign off on Saudi airstrikes against fellow Yemeni government members or security forces defending Yemeni territory against Iran-backed Houthis and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, yet that is what Saudi authorities now claim Al-Alimi did.
Al-Alimi clearly is in his position for the comfort and the pension. Should he step down, he will be like Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi before him and enjoy a luxurious retirement in Saudi Arabia. What is at stake now is Al-Alimi’s legacy. If he does not resign in protest of Saudi Arabia’s murder of Southern Forces, then he effectively endorses the action. He signals that he prefers to protect the Muslim Brotherhood to keep Saudi donors happy than serve the Yemeni people and secure the Yemeni state.
Saudi Arabia may sponsor a meeting of all factions to try to dictate a new order. Any agreement it seeks to impose will be as fraudulent and empty as the 2018 Stockholm Agreement that claimed to end the Houthi stranglehold over Hodeidah. Yemeni Foreign Minister Khaled Alyemany resigned over that fraud rather than lend his name to it. That Al-Alimi does not exposes him to be a man of far less character who shows himself to be an embarrassment to all Yemenis.
