SANAA, Yemen — On March 25, King Salman decided to engage the Saudi military against the Houthis of Yemen, after the latter marched on Aden, the capital of the former South Yemen, where former President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi had sought refuge after escaping from house arrest in February.

The Saudi intervention in Yemen came with the support of a broad Arab alliance — Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt — plus Pakistan, as well as foreign powers including the United States and the European Union. Its stated goal is to re-establish stability in the region and address the security threat which the Houthis had come to represent.

Salman made his position clear on March 27, when he announced, as reported by The Independent: “A Saudi Arabia-led alliance is willing to wage a military campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen for as long as it takes to defeat the Iranian-backed group that has forced the country’s president to flee.”

Speaking at a press conference, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir confirmed that Saudi Arabia, alongside ten other countries, launched a military operation in Yemen against the Houthis, rebel tribal faction organized under the leadership of Abdel-Malik al-Houthi.

“At the time Ambassador Al Jubeir already warned that the ongoing airstrikes will involve other military assets, leaving the door wide open to a potential ground invasion,” said Ali al-Amad, a leading figure of Ansarallah, the Houthis’ political arm, to MintPress News.

“Saudi Arabia took it upon itself to declare war on Yemen, arguing national security, claiming to want to restore Yemen’s legitimate president, Hadi, to the presidency in a bid to safeguard Yemen’s democratic transition, when really it seeks only to assert its imperialistic ambitions upon the Arabian Peninsula,” he added.

Sheikh Mabkout Nahshal, a tribal leader from the northern Yemen province of Hajjah, who in the space of four years saw his country teeter on the verge of civil war more times than he cares to admit, told MintPress that this war Riyadh is waging against the Houthis and, thus, against Yemen has nothing to do with Hadi, democracy or national security — or, at least not Yemen’s national security. It’s about oil and geopolitical maneuvering.

“Al Sauds have always viewed Yemen as a threat to their hegemony, both militarily and geostrategically. Ibn Saud actually told his sons that for Al Saud to survive in the region, Yemen would have to be tamed,” Nahshal said. “This war is about restoring control over a Saudi colony, this war is about putting Yemen’s freedom under lock and key.”

“Everything else, all these talks of sectarianism and democracy, legitimacy and national security, are shiny lies thrown out at the public to hide the truth.”

Indeed, nothing is ever really as it seems in Yemen. The country is a complicated maze of intermixing political interests, sectarian ambitions and geostrategic realities, where world powers are engaging in a bitter fight for control over oil access and resources.

“The new battleground of this Great Game world powers never stopped [playing], Yemen has become the region’s new frontline. What we see unfold in Yemen is the new oil rush, a bitter battle for control over the world oil route Bab al-Mandab. The fact that a nation finds itself caught in the middle of such ambitions is of no consequence to Al Saud,” Ahmed Mohamed Nasser Ahmed, a Yemeni political analyst and former member of Yemen’s National Issues and Transitional Justice Working Group at the National Dialogue Conference, told MintPress.

The NDC was a transitional dialogue process held in Sanaa from March 18, 2013 to Jan. 24, 2014, as part of the 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council-brokered transition of power initiative. It created a space for all Yemeni delegations to negotiate and engineer Yemen’s transition of power and set the terms of constitutional change.

As Yemen breaks under a barrage of bombs, Mohammed Abdel-Salam, a senior spokesman for the Houthis, opened up to MintPress on what he believes is the war which will define the region for decades to come.

Yet in order to understand how Yemen found itself the object of Saudi Arabia’s aggression and why Hadi, the Yemeni president who resigned in January and has fled twice, has called for a broad attack by foreign powers, one must dissect the political myth that Yemen is struggling under the weight of Western propaganda and a Saudi-fuelled sectarian narrative.

Speaking at the Arab League summit in Egypt on March 28, Hadi rejected U.N. Special Envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar’s cease-fire proposal, instead making the case for a more intense military incursion in Yemen until, as he put it, “the Houthi gang surrenders, withdraws from government institutions and gives up arms.”

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