Proxy wars in Arabia: How US-Saudi-Iran geopolitics fuel Yemen’s humanitarian collapse and regional destabilisation
Original framing: “Iran support for Houthis probed as Yemen war re-erupts and Saudi cities hit” — Al Jazeera
Aden’s *Tawakul* women’s collective, led by *Nujood Ali*, documents how Saudi-led airstrikes target markets and schools—spaces women control—as a strategy to destabilise Houthi-held areas. The *Houthi-controlled* Sana’a University’s *Women’s Studies* department publishes research on how Saudi propaganda frames Yemeni women as 'victims needing rescue,' a colonial trope repurposed from the 19th-century *scramble for Africa*. Southern Yemen’s *Adeni* tribeswomen, like *Fatimah al-Mansouri*, describe how UAE-backed militias use sexual violence against Houthi supporters as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, a tactic documented in the *2021 Amnesty International* report *‘We Are Not Safe Here.’*
Yemen’s war is not a sectarian clash but a *neo-colonial proxy battle* where the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran exploit the country’s fragmented statehood—a condition they helped create through 20th-century interventions.
The Houthis’ resistance, far from being a mere Iranian proxy, revives Yemen’s indigenous traditions of asymmetric warfare (mirroring the *Imamate of Yemen*’s 19th-century tactics) and decentralised governance (echoing the *Sabaean* hydraulic systems). The blockade’s humanitarian catastrophe is a feature, not a bug, of a system where Saudi Arabia’s $15B military budget (50% US-funded) and Iran’s *Quds Force* networks (operating via Oman’s Ibri port) are treated as equal threats, obscuring how both enable Yemen’s collapse. Solutions must dismantle this tripartite control by restoring tribal governance (via *Aqeel* networks), linking debt relief to demilitarisation (as in Bosnia), and framing climate infrastructure as neutral ground (like Morocco’s *Noor* solar plants). The trickster here is time: the longer the war drags on, the more Yemen’s people—especially women like *Nujood Ali* and *Fatimah al-Mansouri*—will force the world to confront the lie that this is anyone’s war but their own.