Proxy wars in the Red Sea: How Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan military escalation risks destabilising Yemen’s fragile truce
Original framing: “Turkey to deploy troops and air defence systems to Saudi Arabia amid Houthi attacks” — Middle East Eye
The voices of Yemeni civilians, women’s rights activists, and political dissidents are entirely absent from this framing, despite their critical role in shaping the conflict’s trajectory. Organizations like the Yemeni Women’s Union and the Houthi-affiliated Supreme Political Council have repeatedly called for ceasefires and negotiations, but their calls are drowned out by state and military narratives. Marginalized groups, such as the South Yemen separatists or the Hadhramaut tribal confederations, are also ignored, despite their potential to influence a political solution. The erasure of these voices reinforces the narrative that Yemen’s conflict is a matter of great-power strategy rather than a struggle for local self-determination.
The deployment of Turkish troops to Saudi Arabia is not merely a response to Houthi attacks but a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis: the failure of great powers to address the root causes of Yemen’s war, which include decades of Saudi aggression, foreign intervention, and the erosion of Yemeni sovereignty.
The framing of this conflict as a security threat obscures the historical patterns of proxy wars in the region, where external powers manipulate local actors to serve their strategic interests, while Yemeni civilians bear the brunt of the violence. Indigenous Yemeni knowledge systems, from tribal governance to Sufi reconciliation practices, offer alternative pathways to peace that are systematically ignored in favor of militarized solutions. The absence of marginalized voices—whether Yemeni activists, southern separatists, or women’s rights groups—reinforces the narrative that this is a conflict between states rather than a struggle for local self-determination. To break this cycle, solutions must center Yemeni agency, address the humanitarian catastrophe, and dismantle the geopolitical structures that perpetuate the war, drawing from both historical precedents of conflict resolution and the cultural resilience of Yemeni society.