Afrah Nasser is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. She is a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award and formerly worked as a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Fatima Abo Alasrar is a senior policy analyst at the Washington Center For Yemeni Studies.
In early April, Democracy in Exile hosted a discussion online among Yemeni experts on the 10-year anniversary of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which began just after midnight on March 26, 2015. Afrah Nasser, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC and former Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, joined Fatima Abo Alasrar, a senior analyst at the Washington Center for Yemeni Studies, for a wide-ranging conversation about the past decade of conflict in Yemen and what the future may hold. An expanded U.S. bombing campaign against the Houthis—which the Trump administration began in mid-March in response to ongoing Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and which was the subject of the now notorious Signal chat among senior Trump officials—has raised the specter of a new stage in Yemen's war.
—Frederick Deknatel, Executive Editor
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Without a political solution to what's happening in Yemen and the Red Sea, without a political solution based on a negotiation, a military solution alone is futile. It will not work.
- Afrah Nasser
Frederick Deknatel: Afrah, how do you see the prospects for peace in Yemen today, 10 years after the Saudi-led intervention?
Afrah Nasser: This moment speaks to the loss of so many Yemenis, millions of Yemenis, and the suffering they have endured all these years. We have not seen peace, and we see so many military and diplomatic oversights from the international community, particularly from the United States. There has been no peace over the past decade, and it's still elusive today. I really fear we will have another 10 years of this vicious circle of violence in Yemen, because there are no indications whatsoever of any prospects for peace. The closer you think you're getting to peace, the further it actually becomes. It's so irrational, what's happening in Yemen today. Yemenis are in desperate need of a durable, just, comprehensive peace. The military failure by the Saudi-led coalition is just a grim example of how not to deal with the complexity of what's happening in Yemen.
Deknatel: Fatima, what do you see broadly as the prospects for peace in Yemen today, and more specifically, what do you see as the main obstacles to a peace process in Yemen? There have been various rounds of attempted talks and dialogue by the United Nations, connected to the U.N.-brokered truce, but as we've seen, they have really not gone anywhere beyond just freezing the front lines in Yemen.
Fatima Abo Alasrar: Looking at the past 10 years of this conflict, I'd like to go back to a statement that we heard from Joe Biden. Remember Biden's promise to end Yemen's war? When we heard that, the reaction from me and from many people in Yemen and in the Yemeni diaspora was, what does that mean? What does it technically translate to—without understanding what comes next, who is going to be left in power, and is there going to be any type of authority in Yemen that would be able to challenge the current de facto authority in the north, meaning the Houthis? That was a question we as Yemenis were really grappling with, seeing the level of control the Houthi militia had amassed.
We see a similar issue with the new Trump administration, which in this case wants to "annihilate" the Houthis. We see this messaging that Red Sea security is very important, that the security of the region is very important, but you can't annihilate a group like the Houthis without understanding the different layers of complexity surrounding their regime and how they really got in power. You can have a momentary pause, but it won't go very far.
So, I'd say 10 years in, the prospect for peace in Yemen depends less on goodwill and more on leverage. The idea that peace is just simply a matter of getting all parties to the table assumes that everyone is really equally invested in peace—and the Houthis are really not. They're invested in power. They've become very good at using diplomacy as a button to pause the conflict whenever they want. We know, for example, with the current U.S. airstrikes and what's happening, we really don't have a peace process, we just have a freeze.
Peace in Yemen right now—without addressing the country's fragmentation, without looking at the role of ideology and the role of the "Axis of Resistance"—it's just not going to be attainable. You've asked about the obstacles for peace, and there are so many. For a very long time, we thought diplomacy might be the answer to Yemen's problems. But 10 years in, diplomacy wasn't able to deliver anything. It just built on that illusion that the Houthis are a domestic insurgency with local demands, and diplomacy just could not meet their demands at every step. But at every step, they kept on raising the ceiling of their demands.
How do you really deal with a theocratic militia that is so embedded in this regional power play? That's a very important question, and that's something that has not been tackled in the past 10 years. U.N. envoys still treat the Houthis as an independent actor. That was, and still remains, a blind spot in international policymaking in Yemen. Peace is not going to be possible if we keep putting things in different compartments, and if we keep pretending that the past decade in Yemen was just a tragic misunderstanding. I think that we need more clarity about the situation in Yemen, and to build more leverage that would not just appease the oppressors on the ground, but actually challenge them.
Deknatel: There's a lot of different angles there to follow up on. The first one is the point you made about Biden's pledge to end the war in Yemen. That was also echoed in a piece in Democracy in Exile last year by another Yemeni expert, who asked: Ending the war in Yemen, which one? As that contributor, Fernando Carvajal, wrote: "Biden's promise to 'end the war in Yemen' failed to specify which war he aimed to end. The Houthis' long war against the Yemeni state? The multisided intra-Yemeni war, which includes southern secessionists? Or the war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia?"
I would be remiss also if I did not ask about "Signalgate" and the ongoing U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis that the Trump administration launched in mid-March. What do you both make of these U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis, and what could the potential blowback be?
The idea that peace is just simply a matter of getting all parties to the table assumes that everyone is really equally invested in peace—and the Houthis are really not. They're invested in power.
- Fatima Abo Alasrar
Abo Alasrar: The point of the airstrikes, as stated, is deterrence. The U.S. cannot defeat the Houthis, not in the way that it's doing it right now. Historically, I don't know exactly how you can defeat a non-state actor that is deeply embedded in a population through airstrikes alone, without causing huge collateral damage. We've seen airstrikes all over Yemen, but I don't think the message is about defeating the Houthis; it's about just containing them. That's why they have been hitting targets like their communication towers and radar targets. It's not the same targets that the Saudis hit 10 years ago.
The point should be that there needs to be a containment strategy, because you can't really let a non-state actor set the pace in global shipping lanes or dictate what it wants to do in the region. That's really dangerous. The problem here is that you could have some tactical success, but the Houthis would continue firing. There should be no illusion about that. Why? Because the strikes on Red Sea shipping are tactical and the Houthis are playing a long game—a long ideological game.
What concerns me is not just the military aspect. It's the lack of—you mentioned "Signalgate," so the lack of really any narrative discipline. The Signal leak didn't just show what the U.S. is doing; it showed that we didn't fully understand why we were doing it. That, for me, was concerning, because it made it look like we were improvising what we were doing in Yemen. If you want the airstrikes to mean something, they need to be paired with strategy.
The way that I think about the Signal leak, let's for a moment pretend that Signal was not the issue, and that this was a credible chat that was hacked. It's the conversation itself that really deeply bothers me, because what I saw was something between policy and impulse. It looks like we lost the plot on that one. It also revealed the casual detachment on how decisions about Yemen are discussed in Washington, as if the strikes are just moves on a board, without any real-world consequences.
And here's the irony: While some officials were busy chatting about targets, and that leaked, the Houthis were already preparing a spin on the entire thing. They launched a report on their Houthi-run websites, taking the screenshots and saying, "Look, the United States doesn't know what it is doing in Yemen and all we have to do is just wait them out."
Nasser: To me, "Signalgate" looked like as if Trump and his inner circle were playing some kind of video game. It showed how there is no seriousness in dealing with the Yemen question, or really with Yemen in general. We saw that with the Saudi-led coalition, too. When they entered Yemen, they thought that in six weeks they could finish the job and leave. And now we see an unrealistic approach in dealing with such a huge geopolitical issue, with the Houthis just being discussed this way on a group chat. It was really a testimony to the recklessness and disregard of the significance of the situation in Yemen.
Without a political solution to what's happening in Yemen and the Red Sea, without a political solution based on a negotiation, a military solution alone is futile. It will not work. I hope Yemen will not be another Afghanistan stuck in a war with the U.S. for decades or more.
Deknatel: With the Houthis' missile and drone attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, under both the Trump administration now and the Biden administration before it, there has been this idea in Washington that you have to "do something." As we've seen going back to both Iraq and Afghanistan, for the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond, there has often been this sense that "doing something" just means U.S. airstrikes. Using American military power alone, without any other leverage, whether it's diplomacy or a wider policy aim.
Shurooq al-Qasemi (audience question): I just wanted to say it's amazing to see an event organized about Yemen and the stage is entirely given to Yemeni voices. My question is, as we've been talking about lessons learned in Yemen over the past 10 years, what haven't we learned? By that, I mean national actors in Yemen. What have Yemeni national actors not learned 10 years after the Saudi intervention?
Abo Alasrar: Yemenis need to speak out, not just about the war, but from within. We don't need to be handed a seat—we need to be claiming it, step by step, in every form that we can reach. Yemenis should not be waiting for permission to do so. The disconnect between how international actors define peace and how Yemenis experience it is one of the most painful lessons of the past decade. For some, peace means fewer missiles. For Yemenis, peace means no prisons, no disappearances, no indoctrination, no war economy. For others also it means sovereignty. It means dignity, a chance to rebuild a political life without fear.
As far as what national actors in Yemen haven't learned, I actually think they've learned quite a lot. I think they've learned how to engage and survive in international forums, how to adapt in an environment where recognition often goes to the loudest voices and not necessarily the most grounded ones. But look at the beginning of the conflict, Yemenis were even more divided than the country is now.
What happened in Yemen after the Houthis seized power, with Yemen's collapse and the power vacuum, helped bring so many grievances up to the top. Whether it's from the southerners or from the Hadramawis, you started seeing regionalism in Yemen in a way that I've never seen before. It's all coming to the surface, and we're grappling with this now. Throughout the war, the Houthis had one unified demand: stop the airstrikes. But Yemenis were grappling with so many other things, including all these other entities that had popped up, like the Southern Transitional Council and others. The Houthis kept on capitalizing on this moment of discord among multiple Yemeni factions that were there.
I think all the anti-Houthi factions don't want to think about "the day after," because right now, their other priority is just too huge—and that is to contain the Houthis in some way or another, disarm them, stop them from this indoctrination, stop them from using Yemen for a political cause that has nothing to do with Yemen. I think that's what other Yemenis are learning. We are trying to define what Yemen is. Political actors that you wouldn't have otherwise felt might talk are talking right now. Maybe there's just a little bit of a silver lining there. Everyone is exhausted, I know. It's been 10 years of this misery, and we're not seeing the Houthis contained.
Hopefully U.S. policymakers and others can start investing in Yemenis and those who are trying to build something, not just survive. Maybe stop asking if Yemen is "ready for peace," and instead ask if the world is finally ready to treat Yemen as more than someone else's problem.
Nasser: Something I've been thinking about over the past 10 years is that if there's a political will to start a war, it means there could be a political will to end the war. It's so simple and basic. But at the same time, I learned that states are not charity organizations that you can go to and seek support with nothing in return or no shared interests, which brings up the question, what is the responsibility of the Yemeni government? I have learned that you cannot win as the Yemeni government. You cannot win a war when you're sitting in hotels in Riyadh, with your officials living a lifestyle of wealth and prosperity abroad. You cannot rule Yemen with a remote control from abroad.
As long as Yemeni leaders are just puppets for others, with no decision-making of their own, you cannot win a war with non-state actors inside Yemen. There is a very important discussion to have within Yemenis about the responsibilities and the failure of the Yemeni government. There is a long list of corruption allegations. Almost everyone inside Yemen is very frustrated with the government and its leadership style. This was one of the lessons learned during these 10 years of misery.
