After more than a thousand attacks by the USA and allies, the West is still far from being able to win against an organization of guerrillas that has become a real army.
From 15 March last today, almost a thousand sorties of the allied armed forces are now, or US but also English, in Yemen. Of these, about 800 are the objectives attributable to structures of the Houthi rebels, or to arsenals who are used to hit commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. On Sunday 27 April, in an official declaration, the Central Command of the United States (Centcom) said: “We will continue to increase the pressure and further disintegrate the ability of the Houthi until they continue to hinder freedom of navigation”. So far the Pentagon has released few details on its progress in the region, on the costs and number of civilians injured by the incursions, however in its declaration Centcom has argued that the hesitation in the dissemination of information was born from the need to protect the military operational security.
According to the information of the open channels, such as social networks, these attacks would have killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and their leaders, including some high officials involved in the organization of forces that use missiles and drones. From Washington, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said that the goal is to reopen safe commercial navigation in the Red Sea, considered an important waterway for global trade which at the end of 2023 was compromised with a drop in traffic of 85%.
Today the attacks with missiles and drones launched by the Houthi decreased by 69% And the attacks with Kamikaze drones of 55%, but although decreased these continue to discourage the navigation companies from returning to their old routes and consequently to drop the prices of insurance and transport. As for the costs, they are certainly very high, given the involvement of a considerable number of military resources belonging to two attack groups, each of which has a carrier as a flagship, or a force usually reserved for much more serious crises.
In the last month, the US also sent new hunting units, bombers and air defense units to the Regionbut this increase in military presences concerned a good number of democratic representatives to the congress who fear that the Pentagon is using ammunition that should instead be kept for a potential conflict with China in the ado-patient region. Their republican colleagues, on the other hand, argue that the efforts are not enough, especially those put in place in December 2023 by the Biden administration that had launched their own initiative to reopen the global maritime transport, or to create a multinational task force called “Prosperity Guardian operation” to escort the commercial ships in the Red Sea, parallel to a bombing campaign against Houthi objectives.
It is true that the asymmetrical operation, or against an unorganized force as an army, has not been able to reassure The navigation companies on the fact that the red sea routes were confident again. Among the objective difficulties of being able to trace the targets, intended as groups of militiamen ready to act but also transport of supplies and deployment of weapons, it is first of all the vastness of the Yemeni territory, as well as the multiplicity of communication routes through which the rebels can be supplied by Iran.
The Yemenian conflict is a long -standing war, complicated by the bad decision of Saudi Arabia It took place in 2015 to lead an alliance between Arab States determined to suffocate the revolution of the political-religious movement of the Houthi, wrongly considered until recently a “association of sheep” and instead results to be the only alternative to the chaos of the nation. Thus, underestimating the potential for too long, the Houthi turned from force organized for the guerrilla war into a regular army complete with armed air transport, such as the old Mi-8 and Mi-24 Russian helicopters, and of ex-Soviet t-80 tanks built at the end of the seventies and put back into operation after being purchased used by Russia and Belarus. The strength and potential of the Houthi have therefore been considered weak and instead today, despite the losses suffered by the Yemenites and the help to the USA provided by the United Kingdom and Israel, the western military marinas are still far from being able to win and, worse, nations are not in a position to overthrow a regime that controls 70% of what remains of a nation from the complex and hostile position, but from the strategic position for the strategic position. East.
