… Normally I don’t wade in on something that’s easy to debunk with the most cursory of google searches but hey, this one looked fun.
We’ll start with the dry facts (lifted from Wikipedia)
The Yemeni Civil War of (2015 to present) is an ongoing conflict that began in 2015 between two factions, the legitimate Yemeni government lead by Hadi and the Iranian backed Houthi militia where each one of them claiming to constitute the Yemeni government, along with their supporters and allies.
Houthi forces controlling the capital Sana’a and allied with forces loyal to the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh have clashed with forces loyal to the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, based in Aden. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have also carried out attacks, with AQAP controlling swathes of territory in the hinterlands, and along stretches of the coast.
Now to be clear, the Western forces are backing Hadi and not the Houthi militia. The reason being that the Houthi’s have been an insurgent group from the outset, and have sought to gain power through violence at more or less every step of the way. The reason the civil war is still happening is that Hadi called the Houthi takeover of the Presidential compound an illegal coup (and there are not exactly many other ways to frame it).
Whilst the link from Iran to the Houthi’s remains at best tenuous (unlike the link from Iran to Hezbollah which is as concrete as it gets) there are still questions raised as to how the Houthi rebels are maintaining logistics and weaponry when faced with a significantly superior enemy in terms of capabilities.
As for the Human Rights situ? Well that’s a goddamned mess no matter which angle you look at it from. The Saudi’s hands are very bloody, as are people who supplied them with the hardware. The rebels aren’t exactly squeaky clean either.
As with most things in the Middle East, it’s not just a case of “The west” vs “whoever”, there’s local elements which make the mess very muddy and therefore you end up with a lot of intra-national and international actors all with their own piece of the pie.
