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In a recent Wall Street Journal exclusive, US officials working closely under President Trump’s Middle East policy team said that the White House would be “open to supporting” a ground invasion of northern Yemen by a large militia conglomerate in the south.
Despite criticizing former President Biden’s bombing of Yemen in 2024, Trump has pursued an even more violent approach to containing the controlling faction—known shorthand as the Houthis—and their ability to strike merchant shipping passing through the Red Sea.
It’s feared such an escalation would plunge the poorest country in the Middle East back into the debilitating humanitarian crisis that was labeled the “worst” in the world between 2017 and 2022, when hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed from lack of food, water, and medicine by a combination of Saudi Arabian bombing of infrastructure and a US-sanctions and embargo campaign.
According to Yemeni and US officials, the militia groups in the south of the country financed by the United Arab Emirates could launch an attack on Houthi positions in the north that have already been bombed by the US. A key target would be Hodeidah port, one of two major ports in the country, and the only one held by the Houthis.
WSJ reports further that private American security contractors provided advice to the Yemeni militias, and UAE officials briefed the US on their plans earlier this week. The US is open to supporting a ground operation by local forces, though no decision has been made yet. Estimates from The New Arab back in 2019 that these militias—known as the Southern Transitional Council—could number as high as 52,000 based on plans which were ongoing at the time. Houthi forces were estimated at 200,000.
The Houthis began to attack merchant shipping transiting the Red Sea through the Suez Canal following Israel’s siege on Gaza. They regularly attacked any ship belonging to a company or country that either supports Israel militarily or has refused to condemn Israel’s attacks. This has included ships from Greece owned by companies that are listed on the US stock exchanges. Bombing of the Houthi’s drone and missile capabilities during the Biden Administration didn’t interrupt the attacks at all, with Biden responding candidly to a reporter once that “No, they aren’t working, but yes, they will continue”.
By dramatic contrast, Trump has escalated attacks against the Houthis with more than 350 strikes during its current campaign. However, Houthi attacks have made it to Israeli territory, and the group which has now controlled all governmental services and roles in the country since 2015 have even fired on the USS Harry Truman, an aircraft carrier that is leading the bombing/policing efforts.
Though Houthi spokesmen have said that attacks on shipping will cease once Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians ends, a statement that proved true during the recently ended Ramadan ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, Tareq Saleh, the head of the Yemeni National Resistance faction, said military action was the only way to end the threat represented by the Houthis.
Switching sides
In 2015, WSJ reported that the Pentagon under then-President Obama had recruited the Houthis to “maintain its fight against a key branch of al-Qaeda,” called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, the group which bombed the USS Cole in 2000 and killed 17 seamen and injured 37. Dug into the fractious environment of southern Yemen, that had only 20 years before been an entirely separate country, the Houthis from the north were seen as a key ally in that fight after the Zaydi Shi’ite militia took control of the country during a brief civil war in 2015.
But only a month after the WSJ report, the Obama government announced it was switching sides to back Saudi Arabia in its intervention in the country which turned into the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, killing hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.
Saudi Arabia’s chief regional ally in the effort was the UAE, but by 2019 the New Arab had reported that Abu Dhabi was withdrawing its troops and building an “army” out of militia factions located in the south under the banner of the Southern Transitional Council (STC). Included among them are the Salafist Giants Brigade, and, as the BBC reported in 2019, members of AQAP, including Nasser al-Shiba who planned the Cole bombing himself, and who received a commanding role within the STC.
In 2022, the man whom Saudi Arabia intended to install in power in Sana’a, Abd Mansour Hadi, announced he was abdicating his presidential authority to a Presidential Leadership Council that would form a new government inside the nation, as Hadi lived in Riyadh. The Giants Brigade commander Abdulrahman Abu Zara’a Al Muharrami is a member of the Presidential Leadership Council. WaL
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