A blocked Iranian flight to Yemen set off Houthis' latest spiral with Saudi Arabia

CAIRO (AP) — A volley of fire between the Iranian-backed Houthis and Saudi Arabia has threatened to upend a 2022 truce in Yemen and open another front in the already expanding war in the Middle East after the collapse of the ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran.

“Yemen today faces a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict than at any point since the U.N.-brokered truce of April 2022, ” U.N. envoy Hans Grundberg warned.

The escalation, he said, risks “jeopardizing the gains of the 2022 truce ... while also drawing the country into a broader regional confrontation , with devastating consequences for its people.”

Grundberg said he has engaged in intensive talks with Yemeni parties and regional governments to avert further escalation.

The tit-for-tat attacks started July 13 with a Saudi airstrike that hit the runway of the airport in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, preventing the landing of an Iranian flight carrying a high-ranking Houthi delegation.

Flying a flight without prior permission from the Saudi-led coalition — a decade-long, war-related requirement — was an attempt by the Houthis to establish a new reality on the ground, challenging the coalition’s control over Yemeni airspace.

The rebels, apparently emboldened by the fallout of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, sought to gain political and economic concessions from Saudi Arabia, and insisted on lifting the Saudi blockade on territories they control in Yemen.

They turned down an offer by the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government in Yemen to facilitate the Houthi delegation’s travel to Sanaa on a non-Iranian airline, said government and Houthi officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks.

The Houthis proceeded with the flight operated by Iranian-privately owned, U.S.-sanctioned Mahan Air , forcing the Saudi-led strike that disabled the Sanaa airport.

The Saudi-led coalition eventually allowed the flight to land in the Houthi-controlled city of Hodeida, as part of Omani-led effort to avert an escalation, said a Gulf official, who demanded anonymity to discuss the matter.

Yasmeen al-Eryani, an analyst at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, argued that the Mahan Air flight saga is part of Iran’s escalation of the war.

“By activating the Yemeni front, Tehran reiterates the strategic value of that pressure lever and signals that attacks on Iran can produce costs elsewhere, particularly for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf,” she said.

Following the Sanaa airport strike, the Houthis attacked the Abha airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia and announced a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. They attacked Saudi vessels as well as oil facilities inside the kingdom, adding further disruption to the global economy.

The Saudi-led coalition responded with strikes on Hodeida and Kamaran, Yemen’s largest island in the Red Sea. It has also reinforced Yemeni troops along the front lines in Yemen to launch a ground offensive on Houthis, the Yemeni officials said.

Anticipating a ground offensive, the rebels launched dozens of missiles and drones on military camps in central and southern Yemen, which killed dozens of troops and civilians. They also attacked the Red Sea city of Mokha, severely damaging the city’s crucial port, which remains under the control of the internationally recognized government.

In recent years, the Houthis have faced growing internal challenges stemmed from deteriorating living conditions in their territories.

“A prolonged situation of ‘no war, no peace’ has raised public expectations for tangible economic and living improvements, generating growing internal pressure on the group,” Salah Ali Salah, a Yemeni researcher, said.

They sought to turn the blame on Saudi Arabia for its air and naval blockade on their territories and framed the escalation as an extension of the Yemen war, rather than a new front in the Iran war, he said.

The blockade was part of the war efforts by the Saudi-led coalition that entered the conflict in March 2015, six months after the Houthis descended from their northern stronghold and took control of Sanaa, forcing the government to flee to the south then to Saudi Arabia.

The war has turned Yemen to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, and people living in the Houthi-held territories are the most hungry.

The conflict eventually deteriorated into a stalemate and the warring parties reached a truce in April 2022 that ended major fighting across the country and stopped Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which quit the coalition over a year ago.

The Omani back-channel talks focused on averting the collapse of the 2022 truce, but have yet to produce a compromise.

Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the escalation reflected a broader shift in Houthi priorities, from attempting to extract confidence-building measures, such as payment of salaries to civil servants in Houthi-controlled areas, to clearly casting the conflict as being about Yemen’s sovereignty over its airspace, ports and territorial waters.

“By taking direct action to reassert this view, the Houthis have raised the political stakes and made future compromise considerably more difficult,” he said.