DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The struggle for an ancient desert city in war-torn Yemen has become key to understanding wider tensions now fueling the Middle East and the challenges facing President Joe Biden’s administration. is facing to expel US troops. of the region.
Fighting is raging in the mountains outside Marib as Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who control Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, try to seize the city, which is crucial to the country’s energy supply.
Saudi Arabia, which has led a military coalition supporting the exile government of Sanaa since 2015, has launched an air strike following an air strike to slow the Houthi advance towards Marib. The Houthis retaliated with drone and missile strikes deep in Saudi Arabia, causing global oil markets to panic.
The battle for Marib is likely to shape every political settlement in Yemen’s second civil war since the 1990s. If caught by the Houthis, the rebels can take that advantage in the negotiations and go even further south. If Marib is in the hands of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, it may save its only stronghold as separatists challenge its authority elsewhere.
The battle also puts pressure on the most powerful of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf and entangles any US return to Iran’s nuclear deal. In fact, it complicates the efforts of the Biden administration to slowly shift the US’s sustained massive military deployment to the Middle East to counter what it sees as the emerging threat from China and Russia.
Losing Marib would be “the last bullet in the head of the internationally recognized government,” said Abdulghani al-Iryani, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies. “It will pave the way for the disintegration of the Yemeni state. You look at a generation of instability and humanitarian crises. You are also going to watch a free theater for regional interference. ”
THE OLD OASIS BECOMES WAR FRONT
Marib is located 120 kilometers east of Sana’a, on the edge of the Empty Quarter Desert of the Arabian Peninsula, at the foot of the Sarawat Mountains along the Red Sea. It is believed to be the home of the Biblical Queen of Shebawho gave spices and gold to King Solomon. In the Quran, it was the site of massive floods that accompanied the collapse of the old dam.
The disaster that ravages the city today was entirely man-made. More than 800,000 refugees fleeing Houthi’s takeover of Sanaa in September 2014 and the ensuing war increased the city’s population, the UN refugee agency said.
Taking Marib, or otherwise cutting it off, would be an important prize for the Houthis. It is home to oil and gas fields where international companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Total SA have interests. Marib’s natural gas bottling plant produces cooking gas for the nation of 29 million people. The power plant once provided 40% of Yemen’s electricity. The modern Marib dam is an important freshwater source for a parched country, although it was never fully developed even in peacetime.
When Saudi Arabia took part in the war in Yemen on the side of the government-in-exile in 2015, the kingdom joined the Marib tribes, who long believed that Sanaa and the Houthis had taken their right. Another major political force was Islah, a Sunni Islamic political party that is the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. These disparate forces provided a lifeline for the controversial government-in-exile in Yemen, which is already under pressure from allied secessionists in the south.
For a while, beginning in the fall of 2019, Saudi Arabia reached a detente with the Houthis, said Ahmed Nagi, a non-resident Yemen expert at Carnegie Middle East Center. Citing two Houthi officials familiar with the discussions, Nagi said a back channel agreement ensured that both Saudis and rebels refrain from attacking populated areas.
But when the Houthis started to invade Marib againthe Saudis resume a heavy bombing campaign.
According to the Houthis, “they think they gain more from war than from peace talks,” Nagi said. For the Saudis, “if they lose Marib, they have zero cards on the negotiating table.”
YEMEN CAUGHT IN REGIONAL VISE
The escalating conflict around Marib coincides with major changes in US policy towards the war. President Donald Trump’s administration had declared the Houthis a “foreign terrorist organization,” following a campaign by Saudi Arabia supporting the movement.
Biden has withdrawn the designation as a Houthi terrorist after taking office. He also announced that the US would end support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive combat operations in Yemen, saying, “This war must end.”
But fighting around Marib has only escalated, even as the Saudis recently offered a ceasefireIran’s frustration at the failure of the Biden government to lift sanctions quickly has contributed to “an intensification of attacks by groups in Iraq and the same in Yemen,” said Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an Iranian scientist at the British Royal. United Services Institute.
“Iran is trying to get a message across to the US,” Tabrizi said. “A message that the status quo is not sustainable.”
As experts debate how much control Iran exercises over the Houthis, the rebels are increasingly launching bomb-laden drones previously connected to Tehran deep into the kingdom. Those attacks included a drone crashing into a parked commercial airliner and others focus on large oil facilities, temporary shaking of energy prices.
“Unfortunately, the removal of the Houthis by the US government from the list of (foreign terrorist organizations) appears to have been misinterpreted by the Houthis,” the Saudi government said in a statement to The Associated Press. “This misinterpretation of the measure has led them, with the support of the Iranian regime, to intensify hostilities.”
Since the start of the war, the Houthis have launched more than 550 bomb-laden drones and more than 350 ballistic missiles on Saudi Arabia, the kingdom said. While that has caused damage, injuries and at least one death, more than 130,000 people are said to have died in the war in YemenSaudi Arabia has been repeatedly criticized internationally for airstrikes killing civilians and embargoes exacerbating hunger in a country on the brink of famine.
And although Biden has withdrawn his support, US-made planes and ammunition sold to Saudi Arabia are still targeting Yemen. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has linked the kingdom’s armament to America, allowing the war to take place.
“I ask the Americans this question: did you know what would happen to the Saudis the day you gave them the green light to participate in the Yemeni war?” Khamenei asked in a March 21 speech. “Did you know you’re sending Saudi Arabia into a swamp?”
OUR WEIGHING MIDDLE EAST DEMANDS
Biden’s efforts to end US involvement in the war in Yemen come as his administration tries to rejoin Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Indirect talks began in Vienna on Tuesday.
“The Iranians would like to exchange their Yemen card for something more sustainable,” said al-Iryani, researcher at the Sanaa Center.
Such a deal could serve US interests. Biden’s Defense Department is looking at the redeployment of forces, particularly those in the Middle East, amid what experts call the “ superpower conflict ” America is dealing with with China and Russia.
Withdrawing troops from the Middle East could bolster the forces America may need elsewhere. However, this is probably easier said than done.
In Yemen alone, every US president since George W. Bush has launched drone strikes on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, long considered by Washington to be the militant group’s most dangerous offshoot. Biden has yet to launch such an attack himself, although the group is still active in the east of the country.
US forces remain in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, Arab Gulf states like Saudi Arabia rely on US troops stationed in their country as a counterbalance to Iran.
The US military sent troops to Saudi Arabia in 2019, deployment of anti-missile batteries amid tensions with Iran. However, US forces have recently scaled back that presence.
“The kingdom believes that the US presence in the region can help promote the security and stability of the region by supporting allies dealing with transnational threats primarily sponsored by the Iranian regime,” said the Saudi government. . It did not specifically address the realignments.
Overall, US forces will remain in the Middle East as it remains critical to global energy markets and includes significant marine bottlenecks for global trade, said Aaron Stein, the research director of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. However, what those troops look like will change as the US weighs how to compensate Iran by returning to the nuclear deal, he said.
“It does not resolve the Iranian issue,” Stein said. “It allows us to manage it as if we were in hospice care.”
Follow Jon Gambrell and Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP and www.twitter.com/isabeldebre.