The United States will remove the Houthi military forces, Yemen’s Shiite Muslim sect, from its list of terrorist groups, to allow humanitarian aid to flow back to the civilian population. The decision will apply from next Tuesday. Since the conquest of the Yemeni capital in 2014, the Houthis have clashed with Sunni forces in a bloody civil war often fought without light or stenographers, which the UN says has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
The tragedy is largely caused by the intervention of neighboring countries, in particular Saudi Arabia. Since 2015, and faced with the risk of coming to power in Sana’a of a regime controlled by the Houthis with the support of Shiite Iran, Riyadh has led a military alliance of Sunni Arab countries that systematically bomb rebel positions even though they are surrounded by populations. civil. During his tenure, the Trump Administration provided logistical and political support to Riyadh for strategic reasons – preventing the victory of Iran and its Houthi allies at all costs – although it avoided the involvement of US troops in the fighting. Now, according to President Biden, “the time has come to end the conflict.” Or at least to relieve it. The removal of the Houthis from the list of terrorist groups will unblock US humanitarian aid for the Shiite-controlled half of Yemen.
The question now being asked by analysts extends to other countries in the world to which President Biden’s principle could be applied. In the situation in Yemen, with less dramatic accents, there are countries in which the economic blockade or the inclusion of governments and movements on the terrorist list aggravates the ordeal suffered by their civilian populations, already heavily punished by the action of their regimes. totalitarians. These are the cases, for example, of Cuba and Venezuela, or the Hamas movement in Gaza.
