With an Ansarallah takeover of Yemen, Asia's
trade and connectivity projects could expand
into some of the world's most strategic
waterways
By Pepe Escobar
November 21, 202:
Information Clearing House
- The usual suspects
tried everything against Yemen.
First, coercing it into ‘structural
reform.’ When that didn’t work, they
instrumentalized takfiri mercenaries. They
infiltrated and manipulated the Muslim
Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP), ISIS. They used US drones
and occasional marines.
And then, in 2015, they went Total
Warfare: a UN-backed rogue coalition started
bombing and starving Yemenis into submission
– with barely a peep from the denizens of
the ‘rules-based international order.’
The coalition – House of Saud, Qatar,
UAE, US, UK – for all practical purposes,
embarked on a final solution for Yemen.
Sovereignty and unity were never part of
the deal. Yet soon the project stalled.
Saudis and Emiratis were fighting each other
for primacy in southern and eastern Yemen
using mercenaries. In April 2017, Qatar
clashed with both Saudis and Emiratis. The
coalition started to unravel.
Now we reach a crucial inflexion point.
Yemeni Armed Forces and allied fighters from
Popular Committees, backed by a coalition of
tribes, including the very powerful Murad,
are on the verge of liberating strategic,
oil and natural gas-rich Marib – the last
stronghold of the House of Saud-backed
mercenary army.
Tribal leaders are in the capital Sanaa
talking to the quite popular Ansarallah
movement to organize a peaceful takeover of
Marib. So this process is in effect the
result of a wide-ranging national interest
deal between the Houthis and the Murad
tribe.
The House of Saud, for its part, is
allied with the collapsing forces behind
former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, as
well as political parties such as Al-Islah,
Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood. They have been
incapable of resisting Ansarallah.
A repeat scenario is now playing in the
western coastal port of Hodeidah, where
takfiri mercenaries have vanished from the
province’s southern and eastern districts.
Yemen’s Defense Minister Mohammad
al-Atefi, talking to Lebanon’s al-Akhbar
newspaper, stressed that, “according to
strategic and military implications…we
declare to the whole world that the
international aggression against Yemen has
already been defeated.”
It’s not a done deal yet – but we’re
getting there.
Hezbollah, via its Executive Council
Chairman Hashim Safieddine, adds to the
context, stressing how the current
diplomatic crisis between Lebanon and Saudi
Arabia is directly linked to Mohammad bin
Salman’s (MbS) fear and impotence when
confronted with the liberation of strategic
Marib and Hezbollah’s unwavering support for
Yemen throughout the war.
A fabricated ‘civil war’
So how did we get here?
Venturing beyond the
excellent analysis by Karim Shami here
on The Cradle, some geoeconomic
background is essential to understanding
what’s really going on in Yemen.
For at least half a millennium before the
Europeans started to show up, the ruling
classes in southern Arabia built the area
into a prime hub of intellectual and
commercial exchange. Yemen became the prized
destination of Prophet Muhammad’s
descendants; by the 11th century they had
woven solid spiritual and intellectual links
with the wider world.
By the end of the 19th century, as noted
in Isa Blumi’s outstanding Destroying
Yemen (University of California Press,
2018), a “remarkable infrastructure that
harnessed seasonal rains to produce a
seemingly endless amount of wealth attracted
no longer just disciples and descendants of
prophets, but aggressive agents of capital
seeking profits.”
Soon we had Dutch traders venturing on
terraced hills covered in coffee beans
clashing with Ottoman Janissaries from
Crimea, claiming them for the Sultan in
Istanbul.
By the post-modern era, those “aggressive
agents of capital seeking profits” had
reduced Yemen to one of the advanced
battlegrounds of the toxic mix between
neoliberalism and Wahhabism.
The Anglo-American axis, since the Afghan
jihad in the 1980s, promoted, financed and
instrumentalized an essentialist,
ahistorical version of ‘Islam’ that was
simplistically reduced to Wahhabism: a
deeply reactionary social engineering
movement led by an antisocial front based in
Arabia.
That operation shaped a shallow version
of Islam sold to western public opinion as
antithetical to universal – as in
‘rules-based international order’ – values.
Hence, essentially anti-progressive. Yemen
was at the frontline of this cultural and
historical perversion.
Yet the promoters of the war unleashed in
2015 – a gloomy celebration of humanitarian
imperialism, complete with carpet bombing,
embargoes, and widespread forced starvation
– did not factor in the role of the Yemeni
Resistance. Much as it happened with the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
The war was a perverse manipulation by
US, UK, French, Israeli and minions Saudi,
Emirati and Qatari intel agencies. It was
never a ‘civil war’ – as the hegemonic
narrative goes – but an engineered project
to reverse the gains of Yemen’s own ‘Arab
Spring.’
The target was to return Yemen back to a
mere satellite in Saudi Arabia’s backyard.
And to ensure that Yemenis never dare to
even dream of regaining their historic role
as the economic, spiritual, cultural and
political reference for a great deal of the
Indian Ocean universe.
Add to the narrative the simplistic trope
of blaming Shia Iran for supporting the
Houthis. When it was clear that coalition
mercenaries would fail to stop the Yemeni
Resistance, a new narrative was birthed: the
war was important to provide ‘security’ for
the Saudi hacienda facing an ‘Iran-backed’
enemy.
That’s how Ansarallah became cast as Shia
Houthis fighting Saudis and local ‘Sunni’
proxies. Context was thrown to the dogs, as
in the vast, complex differences between
Muslims in Yemen – Sufis of various orders,
Zaydis (Houthis, the backbone of the
Ansarallah movement, are Zaydis), Ismailis,
and Shafii Sunnis – and the wider Islamic
world.
Yemen goes BRI
So the whole Yemen story, once again, is
essentially a tragic chapter of Empire
attempting to plunder Third World/Global
South wealth.
The House of Saud played the role of
vassals seeking rewards. They do need it, as
the House of Saud is in desperate financial
straits that include subsidizing the US
economy via mega-contracts and purchasing US
debt.
The bottom line: the House of Saud won’t
survive unless it dominates Yemen. The
future of MBS is totally leveraged on
winning his war, not least to pay
his bills for western weapons and technical
assistance already used. There are no
definitive figures, but according to a
western intel source close to the House of
Saud, that bill amounted to at least $500
billion by 2017.
The stark reality made plain by the
alliance between Ansarallah and major tribes
is that Yemen refuses to surrender its
national wealth to subsidize the Empire’s
desperate need of liquidity, collateral for
new infusions of cash, and thirst for
commodities. Stark reality has absolutely
nothing to do with the imperial narrative of
Yemen as ‘pre-modern tribal traditions’
averse to change, thus susceptible to
violence and mired in endless ‘civil war.’
And that brings us to the enticing
‘another world is possible’ angle when the
Yemeni Resistance finally extricates the
nation from the grip of the hawkish,
crumbling neoliberal/Wahhabi coalition.
As the Chinese very well know, Yemen is
rich not only in the so far unexplored oil
and gas reserves, but also in gold, silver,
zinc, copper and nickel.
Beijing also knows all there is to know
about the ultra-strategic Bab al Mandab
between Yemen’s southwestern coast and the
Horn of Africa. Moreover, Yemen boasts a
series of strategically located Indian Ocean
ports and Red Sea ports on the way to the
Mediterranean, such as Hodeidah.
These waterways practically scream Belt
and Road Initiative (BRI) and especially the
Maritime Silk Road – with Yemeni ports
complementing China’s only overseas naval
base in Djibouti, where roads and railways
connect to Ethiopia.
The Ansarallah–tribal alliance may even,
in the medium to long term, exercise full
control for access to the Suez Canal.
One very possible scenario is Yemen
joining the ‘string of pearls’ – ports
linked by the BRI across the Indian Ocean.
There will, of course, be major pushback by
proponents of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ agenda.
That’s where the Iranian connection enters
the picture.
BRI in the near future will feature the
progressive interconnection between the
China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) –
with a special role for the port of Gwadar –
and the emerging China–Iran corridor that
will traverse Afghanistan. The port of
Chabahar in Iran, only 80 km away from
Gwadar, will also bloom, whether by
definitive commitments by India or a
possible future takeover by China.
Warm links between Iran and Yemen will
translate into renewed Indian Ocean trade,
without Sanaa depending on Tehran, as it is
essentially self-sufficient in energy and
already manufactures its own weapons. Unlike
the Saudi vassals of Empire, Iran will
certainly invest in the Yemeni economy.
The Empire will not take any of this
lightly. There are plenty of similarities
with the Afghan scenario. Afghanistan is now
set to be integrated into the New Silk Roads
– a commitment shared by the SCO. Now it’s
not so far-fetched to picture Yemen as a SCO
observer, integrated to BRI and profiting
from Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)
packages. Stranger things have happened in
the ongoing Eurasia saga.