US Setting Up Military Bases in Eastern Yemen, Along Red Sea Coast, Houthis Say

The United States is building several military bases in the eastern Yemeni provinces of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah, and along the Red Sea coast in the country’s west, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi militia movement, has alleged.

“We cannot accept being controlled by American decisions”, al-Houthi said, speaking to tribal leaders in Ibb, western Yemen on Thursday, his remarks cited by Almasirah, the militia’s official television channel.

Accusing Yemen’s “enemies” of seeking to divide the country, al-Houthi warned that Yemenis would never accept their “diktat”. The militia leader charged Sanaa’s adversaries with taking advantage of the United Nations brokered ceasefire to mobilise military reinforcements.

“The enemies’ recent arrangements are based on their failures throughout the previous stage”, al-Houthi said, referring to the long-running conflict between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who resigned from office on 7 April and transferred power to an eight-member presidential council.

“Enemies, having become frustrated with attempts to impose their diktats through Hadi, have decided to remove him in a humiliating manner”, al-Houthi said. “They brought a bunch of criminals, traitors and thieves to power, and declared them the leaders of the Yemeni nation. In truth, they are the picks of outsiders, not Yemenis”, he said.

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Calling for an immediate halt to foreign meddling in the country, al-Houthi vowed that “the Yemeni people will continue to tread the path of independence and freedom, and will prevent foreigners from interfering in their domestic affairs”.

The Pentagon has not commented on al-Houthi’s allegations.

The US military stationed hundreds of special operations troops and contractors at the Al Anad Air Base in southern Yemen from the 2000s to the mid-2010s, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda militants operating in the country’s south and southeast. These forces were pulled out in March 2015.

The US began drone-striking Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants in November 2002, killing hundreds of suspected militants, but also scores of civilians, with documents obtained by The Intercept in 2015 revealing that as many as 1,576 people, including at least 261 civilians and 46 children, were killed in the drone strike campaign up to that time.

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Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Gulf allies launched a military operation in Yemen in 2015 to try to restore Hadi to power in the wake of a Houthi-led uprising in the western half of the country. Between 2015 and 2021, the Obama and Trump administrations provided the Saudi-led coalition with substantive security assistance for the Yemen war, including refuelling support, weapons and ammunition, as well as logistical and intelligence aid. The Biden administration’s announcement in February 2021 that the US would be ending this aid, and Washington’s decision to delist the Houthis as a "foreign terrorist organisation", helped poison US-Saudi relations, and pushed Riyadh into supporting a series of shaky ceasefires in Yemen which have been punctuated by renewed violence.

The conflict in Yemen has led to the deaths of over 377,000 people, and some four million displaced internally and externally, according to the United Nations.