Yemen’s tragic descent into chaos, poverty, and humanitarian disaster can be laid at the doors of all parties, foreign and domestic, that have been involved in Yemen’s devastating war, wrote Nabeel A. Khoury in Arab Center Washington DC website, adding “More than a decade into Yemen’s civil war, no end to the conflict is in sight. The lines of control between the two main belligerents have barely changed, and conditions for the Yemeni people continue to be dire while economic conditions across the entire country are terrible”.
Khoury, a former U.S. diplomat served as deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Yemen, from 2004 to 2007, found that the struggle for power between the Houthi rebels and the political and regional leaders loosely allied in the Presidential Leadership Council cannot be separated from the ongoing rivalry for influence between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, each of which is supporting their own preferred groups and leaders to the detriment of a unified front.
Khoury noted that In May 2025, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, expressed his frustration with Yemen’s peace process, which remains stalled despite a 2022 ceasefire and a 2023 peace roadmap to which the Houthis and the PLC initially agreed in principle. Negotiated with support from Saudi Arabia and Oman, the roadmap promised a permanent ceasefire, the sharing of Yemen’s oil revenues to pay salaries, and a general framework to arrive at a permanent political accord between warring factions.
Khoury concluded that “there is no alternative to creative international mediation trying to weave a coherent tapestry out of the snarled ball of yarn that is Yemen and the broader Middle East”.
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