Justin Marozzi

The last thing Yemen needs is more war. But that is what it’s getting

After years of hearing how terrible Western interventions are in the Middle East (Exhibits A, B and C the fiascos of Iraq, Afghanistan and post-Gaddafi Libya), it will be interesting to see how a Saudi-led all-Muslim intervention fares in Yemen.

My prediction is it won’t be much better than those of the infidels. For a start we are dealing with the poorest country in the Arab world. Whereas Iraq sits on a lake of oil, squandering the proceeds with a venality that is ghastly to behold, Yemen is running out of water, let alone oil. With an estimated GDP per capita of $2,500, the country comes 187th in the world. The figure for Saudi Arabia, incidentally, is $31,300. The last thing Yemen needs is more war.

Yet thanks to the extraordinary trauma gripping the Middle East, that is exactly what the land known by Romans as Arabia Felix is getting. The situation is so bad that Yemenis are now fleeing their beleaguered country in their droves to… Somalia.

Discount all the protestations that this is not a sectarian conflict. Certainly it began as a domestic fight for power between the Shia Houthis of the northwest and the Sunni government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who fled the capital of Sanaa in February. But things have moved on rapidly and this is now part of a regional war that pits Sunni Saudi Arabia against Shia Iran and involves a great swathe of the Middle East encompassing Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen.

This conflict is already following a familiar script. An estimated 75,000 civilians have already been displaced, food prices are going through the roof and medical facilities are stretched to breaking point. On Wednesday, in what for a moment looked like a grim April Fool’s Day story, at least 25 people were killed following an explosion at a dairy factory in Yemen’s Hodaida port, the largest loss of civilian life since the conflict began on 26 March.

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