In 2015, with Hadi in exile, Riyadh launched a military campaign-primarily fought from the air-to roll back the Houthis and restore the Hadi administration to Sanaa. Southern separatists ramped up their calls for secession. Other militias mobilized against the Houthi-Saleh forces, aligning with those in the military who had remained loyal to the Hadi government. Military division. Military units loyal to Saleh aligned themselves with the Houthis, contributing to their battlefield success. Hadi’s government resigned under pressure in January 2015 and Hadi later fled to Saudi Arabia. Houthi takeover. The Houthis captured much of Sanaa by late 2014. Reneging on a UN peace deal, they consolidated control of the capital and continued their southward advance. Hadi’s supporters and the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated party, al-Islah, held counterrallies.
The Houthi movement, which had attracted support beyond its base with its criticisms of the UN transition, organized mass protests demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. Several factors widened these political divisions and led to full-scale military conflict.įuel price hikes. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which had extended to Yemen a $550 million loan premised on promises of economic reforms, Hadi’s government lifted fuel subsidies in 2014. Humanitarian Crises What caused the current crisis?
But the NDC ended with delegates unable to resolve disputes over the distribution of power. As part of the GCC’s timetable for a transition, the UN-sponsored National Dialogue Conference (NDC) convened 565 delegates in 2013 to formulate a new constitution agreeable to Yemen’s many factions. His vice president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, assumed office as interim president in a transition brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional organization based in Saudi Arabia, and backed by the United States. Under escalating domestic and international pressure , Saleh stepped aside in 2012 after receiving assurances of immunity from prosecution. While Yemeni security forces focused on putting down protests in urban areas, AQAP made gains in outlying regions. As the popular protests of the 2011 Arab Spring spread to Yemen, the president’s political and military rivals jockeyed to oust him. Rights groups persistently charged that Saleh ran a corrupt and autocratic government. Since then, the United States has provided Yemen more than $850 million in military aid, according to the online database Security Assistance Monitor. service members were killed in the bombing. Navy warship, the USS Cole, in the Yemeni port of Aden. In 2000, al-Qaeda in Yemen, a group that would later become AQAP, conducted a suicide attack on a U.S. The United States lent its support to Saleh beginning in the early 2000s, when counterterrorism cooperation against al-Qaeda and affiliate groups became Washington’s overriding regional concern. The Houthi movement, whose base is among the Zaydi Shiites of northern Yemen, rose up against Saleh’s government six times between 20. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), an Islamist militant group, and the related Ansar al-Sharia insurgent group have captured territory in the south and east. However, just four years after unification, southern separatists seceded for several months and reemerged in 2007 as the Southern Movement, which has continued to press for greater autonomy within Yemen.