Reckoning with Revolutionary Yemen Under Saudi-American Bombs

By: Nalini Persram

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Synopsis: This critical study investigates why the US-backed Saudi-led coalition began bombing Yemen in 2015 and who represent the main protagonists and targets of the military intervention. How was an illegal military campaign resulting in the worst human-made humanitarian crisis in a century allowed to happen? A so-called proxy war involving Ansar Allah (the Houthis) who receive support from Iran, the rhetorical trigger of the intervention was the state coup in 2014 by Ansar Allah and Yemen&’s deposed authoritarian leader, Saleh, that left the &‘internationally recognized&’ government of Hadi confined to the south, and the Ansar Allah-dominated coalition the de facto power in the north. The facilitating conditions of Yemen&’s civil war and its internationalization are traced back multifariously to the hijacking of the democratic Youth Revolution of 2011 by US-Saudi-backed Yemeni elites, Saleh&’s Saudi-funded war against the Houthis in the 2000s, and the Republican Revolution of 1962 that overthrew the Imamate. US imperialism, Saudi regional ambition, and the Gulf oil monarchies&’ determination to keep Yemen weak are, by a global neoliberal corporate monopoly capitalism, hinged to a Yemeni tribal republic constituted by decentralized, neopatrimonial power structured by a kleptocratic-tribal-military nexus. Non-tribal Ansar Allah represent Saudi Arabia&’s greatest dread: Yemeni autonomy.