Conflicts Across the Middle East and Africa

The Yemeni civil war escalated in 2014-15 when Houthi rebels (formally Ansar Allah), a Zaidi Shia movement from northern Yemen, took the capital Sana'a and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi into exile. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition, backed at various points by the United Arab Emirates and supported logistically by the United States and United Kingdom, intervened militarily in March 2015 to restore the Hadi government, launching an extended air campaign. The war has been widely described, including by the UN, as entangled in the broader regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with Iran providing arms and support to the Houthis — a claim Iran has downplayed — while Saudi Arabia and its partners back anti-Houthi forces. The conflict produced a severe humanitarian crisis, with UN agencies at various points describing it as one of the world's worst, including widespread food insecurity, a major cholera outbreak, and tens of thousands of deaths from direct fighting alongside larger indirect death tolls from disease and hunger. A UN-brokered truce in 2022 substantially reduced large-scale fighting, and although it formally lapsed, most parties have since largely maintained a de facto ceasefire even as sporadic violence, Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea beginning in 2023 in stated solidarity with Gaza, and periodic US and allied strikes on Houthi targets have continued.