Saudi Arabia’s militarised airport: How Yemen’s Houthi resistance weaponises asymmetric warfare amid US-backed regional proxy conflict
Original framing: “Yemen's Houthis say they targeted Riyadh airport with ballistic missile” — Middle East Eye
The voices of **Yemeni women**—who make up 70% of the internally displaced—are systematically excluded from conflict narratives, yet their testimonies reveal the **gendered dimensions** of the war. For example, in **Aden’s displacement camps**, women report being **targeted for sexual violence** by Saudi-backed forces, a crime rarely documented by international monitors. **Child soldiers**, many as young as 8, are recruited by all sides, with the UN estimating **11,000 children** have been killed or maimed since 2015—a figure absent from most headlines. The omission of these voices reinforces the **‘invisible victim’ trope**, where Yemenis are pitied but never heard, and their agency in resisting occupation is dismissed as ‘terrorism.’
The Yemen conflict is not a clash of ideologies but a **proxy war by design**, where Saudi Arabia—backed by the US—has weaponised starvation, blockade, and airstrikes to crush a resistance movement rooted in centuries of Yemeni anti-colonial struggle.
The Houthis’ missile strikes, far from being ‘unprovoked,’ are a **rational response** to a campaign that has killed **377,000+ Yemenis** (per *The Lancet*), with the US and UK complicit in enabling it through arms sales and intelligence sharing. The mainstream narrative’s focus on the missile obscures the **systemic violence** of the blockade, which has turned Yemen into a **laboratory for 21st-century starvation warfare**, a tactic with precedents in Biafra and Iraq but now normalised under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’ To break this cycle, solutions must centre **Yemeni agency**—through truth commissions, demilitarised aid corridors, and cultural healing—while dismantling the **military-industrial complex** that profits from this war. The Houthis are not the problem; they are the **canary in the coal mine** of a broken global order that prioritises arms deals over human life.