How Saudi Arabia's anti-Houthi strategy crashed and burned

 For a decade, Saudi Arabia’s Yemen policy has rested on the assumption that time, money and coercive force, patiently and strategically applied, would eventually produce enough leverage to subdue the Houthis, or at least force them into a settlement on Riyadh’s terms.

Over the last two weeks, that assumption has been tested more severely than at any point since 2015, when Saudi Arabia initially launched its military intervention to roll back Houthi control of the Yemeni capital Sanaa. It has not held.

Having seized strategically significant swathes of Yemen’s west coast on the Red Sea, the Houthis are now pressing towards Marib, the last major stronghold of forces loyal to the internationally-recognized government of Yemen, and the site of some of the country’s most important oil and gas facilities.

If losing the Red Sea coast was a blow to the government, losing Marib would be a decisive defeat. It would represent a loss of its last major population and revenue center in the north, and sever its remaining foothold near the capital. It would also open, for the Houthis, the road toward Shabwa and Hadhramawt — two energy-rich eastern provinces that have long been eyed by the Houthis, whose core demands include a slice of the oil and gas wealth these regions produce.

While the headlines tell the story of overwhelming Houthi strength, government forces have also managed some gains. They recaptured positions northwest of Marib and pushed back two major Houthi assaults last week. Advances were also made in western Taiz on Sunday.

Whether government forces can more consistently counterattack and hold ground, instead of collapsing in the face of pressure, is among the most important open questions in the war right now.

The evidence, however, points to structural problems in the anti-Houthi coalition. A detailed reconstruction of the Mokha battle, penned by Yemen analyst Ibrahim Jalal, highlights a Houthi–fabricated withdrawal order, spread by radio and SMS, using an AI-cloned commander’s voice. Those messages tore through a coalition force that lacked, in his account, a joint operations room actually linking the five formations defending the coast.

That detail lines up precisely with what Yemen’s own defense minister, Taher al-Aqili, had already conceded in an interview weeks earlier. As al-Aqili noted, the military “unification” effort since the United Arab Emirates’ withdrawal from Yemen last year has produced a common payroll and biometric ID system, but not the shared training or command structure that would enable the various factions fighting under the government’s umbrella to effectively fight as one force.

Riyadh consolidated the org chart by forcing Emirati forces out of Yemen late last year, reacting to a bold offensive by UAE-backed southern separatists who had seized key territory in the south and were preparing to declare independence. However, forcing out the UAE did nothing to consolidate the military itself, nor did it reconcile the clashing interests of the power brokers who comprise Yemen’s executive Presidential Leadership Council.

Riyadh’s setbacks in Yemen are followed by additional problems to the north. On Friday, Saudi Arabia’s own foreign ministry confirmed that the drones that knocked out its East-West pipeline — the artery carrying up to four percent of global supply away to the Red Sea — had launched from Iraq.

The timing, arriving in the same 72-hour window as the coastal collapse and a fresh wave of Houthi strikes on the Khamis Mushait airbase in the kingdom’s south, suggests coordination. The Associated Press reported in early September, citing Saudi and Iraqi officials, that Houthi emissaries had worked inside an operations room run by Iraqi militias to help plan and execute an earlier swarm attack on Saudi oil infrastructure in July.