A fragile truce that had largely silenced Yemen’s decade-long civil war for four years was torn open this week by a single Iranian flight, turning what began as a dispute over a delegation attending a funeral in Tehran into one of the most dangerous moments in the country’s prolonged conflict, and one that risks pulling Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Houthi proxies and the US into a new and widening war at the worst possible moment.
On Monday, Houthi forces launched a volley of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia’s Abha International Airport, in direct retaliation for strikes on Sanaa International Airport that the rebels blamed on Riyadh.
Houthi military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said the group had also downed a Saudi reconnaissance aircraft on Tuesday, adding that his forces were “prepared to confront any violation of Yemen’s airspace.”
A leading Houthi official, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, delivered a threat that few analysts dismissed as empty. “Their willingness to attack Sanaa airport to prevent flights from arriving or departing gives Yemen the right to strike their airports and to impose on them a siege just as they have done to us,” he told Al Jazeera.
The exchange marked the worst violence between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia in four years, straining a 2022 truce that had survived the entire period since the US-Israel-Iran war began on February 28, until this week.
How a Funeral Flight Started a Crisis
The immediate trigger was the first publicly announced flight between Tehran and Sanaa for more than a decade, which landed in the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital on July 3, creating new tensions. Fighting between the two sides in western Yemen’s Hodeidah governorate the following day killed dozens, the worst violence in four years.
The Houthi leadership had sought to travel to Tehran to attend the funeral of slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose death in February’s US-Israeli strikes had made the journey a matter of symbolic loyalty to their principal patron. Tensions began to flare earlier this month when the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of trying to prevent an Iranian plane from carrying a Houthi delegation to Tehran for the funeral.
When the delegation’s plane returned to Yemen on Monday, the Yemeni internationally recognised government struck Sanaa International Airport’s runway to prevent it from landing.
Rashad al-Alimi, who leads Yemen’s internationally recognised government, said it had rejected a request from Iran to return the Houthi delegation and accused the rebel group of receiving the Iranian flight “outside the legal and sovereign frameworks governing civil aviation.”
The plane was diverted and landed safely at another airport, but the runway strike gave the Houthis the casus belli they needed to retaliate against Saudi Arabia directly.
Saudi Arabian officials did not respond to requests for comment about the airstrikes on Sanaa airport, and have not publicly confirmed involvement, though Houthi and Yemeni government officials both attributed the strikes to the Saudi-led coalition.
Yemen’s Houthis claim they shot down a Saudi Wing Loong II drone over central Yemen. Source: Saudi Military via X
A Ten-Year War, a Four-Year Truce, and a Fragile Status Quo That Was Already Cracking
To understand why this week’s events carry such weight, it is necessary to understand just how much ground the 2022 truce was covering over.
Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when the Houthi movement, a Zaidi Shia rebel group from the country’s mountainous northwest, swept out of their strongholds and seized the capital Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to flee south and then into exile in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in March 2015, launching an air campaign intended to quickly restore the Hadi government and prevent what it described as Iranian strategic encirclement via a proxy force on its southern border.
The campaign instead evolved into one of the most catastrophic conflicts of the 21st century, nearly a decade of war that produced an estimated 150,000 to 377,000 deaths when conflict-related disease and malnutrition are included, according to the United Nations Development Programme, and left 21 million people, roughly two-thirds of Yemen’s population, in need of humanitarian assistance at the conflict’s peak.
The Yemen-based, Iran-backed Houthi rebel group has initiated major land operations to seize control of Marib and Taiz following the collapse of the security agreement with Saudi Arabia. A propaganda video from Ansar Allah was released, threatening an “imminent retaliation” by citing strategic infrastructure. Source: Houthi channel via X
The UN-brokered truce signed in April 2022 stopped most of the large-scale fighting, though it never produced a formal peace deal. It left Yemen effectively partitioned between Houthi control of the north and west, including Sanaa, the port of Hodeidah, and a majority of the country’s population, and an unstable coalition of the internationally recognised government and the separatist Southern Transitional Council holding the south and east. Both sides used the truce years to rearm, reorganise and consolidate control within their respective spheres.
The Iran War Changes Everything
The civil war in Yemen that began in 2014 eventually pitted Iran-backed Houthi rebels against a Saudi-led coalition supporting the country’s government. While the Iran war that began on Feb. 28 reignited all sorts of regional rivalries, the peace between the Houthis and Saudis had mostly prevailed, until Monday.
The Houthis’ relationship with Tehran is the key variable now determining Yemen’s fate. The group has received weapons, training, financial support and strategic guidance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for years, and has in return served as one of Tehran’s most reliable regional proxies, firing missiles at Israel and attacking Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Gaza.
The Iran-backed Houthis have carried out numerous missile attacks against Israel throughout the war, and the rebel group has a history of attacking ships in the Red Sea, disrupting international trade.
With Iran now fighting the US directly, Tehran has every incentive to activate its Yemeni proxy to open new fronts, force Saudi Arabia onto the defensive and create additional leverage in any eventual ceasefire negotiation.
Abdel-Bari Taher, a political analyst in Yemen, said Iran might try to use its Houthi allies as a way to gain negotiating leverage against the US.
“The region now is in a state of an all-out confrontation,” Taher said. “Yemen provides a conflict-prone environment because it’s divided with militias fighting each other and lacks full control over its maritime and airspace.”
Saudi Arabia’s Dilemma: Escalate, Restrain or Be Drawn In
Riyadh faces an excruciating calculation. Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London, said Saudi Arabia has so far shown restraint in the broader US-Israeli war against Iran, but is far less likely to stay on the sidelines when it perceives its influence in Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia to the south, to be under threat.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman entered the 2022 truce partly because the Yemen war had become a strategic and reputational liability, a grinding conflict that had failed to dislodge the Houthis, subjected Saudi cities to Houthi missile and drone attacks, and drawn sustained international criticism over civilian casualties from Saudi airstrikes.
Any return to large-scale fighting risks reigniting all of those costs simultaneously, at a moment when Saudi Arabia’s own security posture is complicated by the broader Gulf crisis over the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet allowing the Houthis to establish a functional air corridor to Iran, effectively enabling Tehran to resupply, redirect and potentially reinforce its most capable Arab proxy through Yemeni airspace, is a red line Riyadh has now publicly acted to enforce, regardless of the consequences.
The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) carried out airstrikes against Sana’a International Airport earlier today, targeting Houthi leadership and infrastructure. Source: X
Both Sides Are Already Mobilising
Both Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Houthi rebel group began mobilising fighters in late June. Salah Ali Salah, a researcher at the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies, described the recent Houthi rhetoric as “striking,” saying the consequences of their actions would not be limited to the front lines in Yemen.
“The Houthis have openly rejected the continuation of the ‘no war, no peace’ status quo while simultaneously expanding campaigns to mobilise fighters and the broader population,” Salah told Al Jazeera.
In Sanaa, Houthi officials have been calling thousands of recruits to training camps, framing the moment as the beginning of a new phase of the broader regional confrontation with the US and Israel.
Ali Mohammed, a member of the Houthis’ popular committees, said thousands of fighters were ready to take part should battles erupt. Yemeni analyst Adel Dashe said years of faltering diplomatic negotiations between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, as well as Saudi Arabia, have meant that a coming military battle cannot be ruled out.
What Happens if Yemen’s War Fully Reignites
A return to large-scale war in Yemen would carry consequences far beyond the country’s borders.
A renewed Houthi campaign against Saudi oil infrastructure- the group struck Saudi Aramco facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019 in one of the most consequential attacks on global energy supply since the first Gulf War- would add a catastrophic additional shock to an oil market already reeling from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The Red Sea shipping lanes, only recently recovering from the Houthi campaign that disrupted global trade for over a year, would almost certainly become a theatre of renewed conflict as well.
The Houthi threat to “siege” Saudi Arabia, if even partially executed, would place Riyadh in the impossible position of fighting a land and air campaign on its southern border while simultaneously managing the spillover from the US-Iran conflict raging to the north.
For Yemen itself, already the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, the implications of another full-scale war barely require elaboration.
Whether Monday’s confrontation proves to be an isolated incident or the opening blow of a renewed civil war may become clearer in the coming days, as Saudi Arabia weighs its response and the Houthis calculate whether Iran’s embattled position has created the opportunity, or the obligation, to escalate.
