Yemen is on the verge of another catastrophic event. The Saudi and United Arab Emirates plan to take the Red Sea port Hodeidah through which most of the food supplies to Yemen's come in.
The port is already under blockade and all ships are strictly controlled. Saudi 'inspections' of ships already taking so long that some food rots before it can reach land. The UN is complaining that there is too little food is coming through:
Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations, with some 8.4 million people severely short of food and at risk of starvation.
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“I am particularly concerned about the recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports,” Mark Lowcock, U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said in a statement read out to a Geneva briefing on Friday.
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“If conditions do not improve, a further 10 million people will fall into this category by the end of the year,” he said.
Eighteen out of twenty-six million Yemenis may soon die of hunger. If that happens it will be a genocide.
The UN has warned that any fighting over the port will have extreme consequences. Eighteen million people will probably starve if the port is blocked or the roads from the port into the hinterland get destroyed due to fighting.
For three years the Saudi and UAE forces have tried to dislodge the Houthi movement from the Yemeni heartland and the capital Sanaa. The Saudis managed to take the flat desert areas in the east and the UAE took the southern coast but all their attempts to move into the mountainous western core of Yemen have failed. The Saudi and UAE forces on the ground are by now mostly local mercenaries from the south reinforced by a few tank and artillery troops from the UAE.
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The cities and towns in the north where the Houthi originally lived were all destroyed by Saudi air attacks. They have no where to go and nothing left to loose. They will not give up.
The attack on Hodeidah comes after months of fighting from south Yemen along the southeastern coast and the Emirate supported troops (blue arrow) are now only 20 kilometers away from Hodeidah.
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Over the weekend the UN envoy Martin Griffiths tried to convince the Houthi to hand over Hodeidah port to the United Nations. But how would the UN run the port? Who would rule the city? How would supplies from Hodeidah port cross the front lines to reach the capital Sanaa?
The Saudi and Emirates aim is simply to starve Yemen into submission. They do not care how many people will die. They do not care what the UN says:
Gulf government officials familiar with UAE and Saudi thinking have said capturing the coast would block Houthi supply lines and push the group to the negotiating table.
Riyadh says the Houthis use Hodeidah to smuggle Iranian-made arms into Yemen, accusations denied by the group and Tehran.
The United Nations has beefed up its inspections of ships bringing humanitarian aid to ensure that no military items are being smuggled and to speed delivery of desperately-needed relief supplies.
All talk about Iran in Yemen or of Iranian supplies is nonsense. The Saudis and Emirates control the borders. The ports are under Saudi blockade and tightly controlled. Only a trickle of supplies is smuggled from Oman through their lines. Most of the weapons and ammunition the Houthi use are captured through raids on Saudi troops.
The UAE asked the U.S. to support its operation against Hodeidah with boots on the ground. The U.S. is already coordinating the intelligence for the Saudi/UAE Yemen operation and is providing the ammunition as well as the aerial refueling for the daily bombing runs.
Officially the U.S. will not take part in the operations. Officially the UAE will not attack the city. But that is just obfuscation. The Yemen mercenaries the UAE has hired will take the lead but the UAE and U.S. will be right behind them:
Emirati ground forces are about nine miles from Hodeida, and the UAE government told U.S. officials that they will not move forward. At the same time, however, the UAE says it has no control over the Yemeni government forces that it has trained and assisted.
Today Saudi planes dropped leaflets on the city inciting against the Houthi and asking the population to leave. Hodeidah normally has 600,000 inhabitants. But due to the three years of war many people fled from the rural areas which were bombed and lacked food supplies and moved into the cities. Hodeidah is believed to host more than a million people now who have nowhere else to go.
Today the Houthi managed to delay the operation against Hodeidah. They attacked the thin supply line of the attackers and managed to breach it.
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It is doubtful that the Houthi can hold that point or even destroy those enemy troops they cut off from their supplies. Saudi air attacks will soon dislodge them again and the attack on Hodeidah will proceed.
The consequences will be terrible for the people of Yemen. None of the usually 'concerned' entities seems to be willing or able to prevent that.