Battle for Yemen’s Marib to determine future of Iran-US faceoff

The battle for an ancient desert city in war-torn Yemen has become a key to understanding wider tensions now inflaming the Middle East and the challenges facing any efforts by President Joe Biden’s administration to shift US troops out of the region.

Fighting has been raging in the mountains outside of Marib as Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who hold Yemen’s capital of Sana’a, attempt to seize the city, which is crucial to the country’s energy supplies.

Saudi Arabia, which has led a military coalition since 2015 backing Sana’a’s exiled government, has launched airstrike after airstrike to blunt the Houthi advance toward Marib. The Houthis have retaliated with drone and missile attacks deep inside Saudi Arabia, roiling global oil markets.

The battle for Marib likely will determine the outline of any political settlement in Yemen’s second civil war since the 1990s. If seized by the Houthis, the rebels can press that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south. If Marib is held by Yemen’s internationally-recognised government, it will save perhaps its only stronghold as secessionists challenge its authority elsewhere.

The fight is also squeezing a pressure point on the most powerful of America’s Gulf Arab allies and ensnaring any US return to Iran’s nuclear deal. It’s even complicating the Biden administration’s efforts to slowly shift long-standing US military deployments to the Middle East to counter what it sees as the emerging threat of China and Russia.

Losing Marib would be “the final bullet in the head of the internationally recognised government,” said Abdulghani Iryani, a senior researcher at the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies.

“It will set the stage for the dismemberment of the Yemeni state. You’re looking at a generation of instability and humanitarian crisis. You also will look at a free-for-all theatre for regional meddling.”

 Man-made disaster 

Located 120 kilometres east of Sana’a, Marib sits on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter Desert at the foot of the Sarawat Mountains running along the Red Sea.

It is believed to be the home of the biblical Queen of Sheba, who gave King Solomon riches of spices and gold. In the Quran, it was the site of massive flooding that accompanied the collapse of its ancient dam.

The disaster gripping the city today is entirely man-made. Over 800,000 refugees fleeing the Houthi takeover of Sana’a in September 2014 and the war that followed have swelled the city’s population, according to the UN refugee agency.

Taking Marib, or otherwise cutting it off, would represent a major prize for the Houthis. It is home to oil and gas fields in which international firms including Exxon Mobil  and Total have interests. Marib’s natural gas bottling plant produces cooking gas for the nation of 29 million people. Its power plant once provided 40% of Yemen’s electricity. Marib’s modern dam is a key freshwater source for a parched nation, though it was never fully developed even in peacetime.

When Saudi Arabia entered Yemen’s war in 2015 on the side of its exiled government, the kingdom allied itself with the tribes of Marib, who long perceived Sana’a and the Houthis as disenfranchising them.

Another major political power was Islah, a Sunni Islamist political party that is Yemen’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. These disparate forces provided a lifeline for Yemen’s embattled exiled government, which already faces pressure from allied secessionists in the south.

For a while, beginning in the fall of 2019, Saudi Arabia reached a detente with the Houthis, said Ahmed Nagi, a non-resident Yemen expert at the Carnegie Middle East Centre. Citing two Houthi officials familiar with the discussions, Nagi said a back channel agreement saw both the Saudis and the rebels refrain from attacking populated areas.

But when the Houthis began to push again into Marib, the Saudis resumed a heavy bombing campaign.

For the Houthis, “they think they gain through war more than peace talks,” Nagi said. For the Saudis, “if they lose Marib, they’ll have zero cards on the negotiating table.”

 Caught in regional tensions

The escalating conflict around Marib coincides with major changes in US policy toward the war. President Donald Trump’s administration had declared the Houthis a “foreign terrorist organisation,” following a campaign by Saudi Arabia supporting the move.

Biden rescinded the Houthi terrorist designation after entering office. He also announced the US would halt support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive combat operations in Yemen, saying: “This war has to end.”

But fighting around Marib has only escalated even as the Saudis recently offered a ceasefire deal. Iran’s frustration over the Biden administration’s failure to swiftly lift sanctions has contributed to “an intensification of attacks by groups in Iraq, and the same in Yemen,” said Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an Iran scholar at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

“Iran is trying to deliver a message to the US,” Tabrizi said. “A message that the status quo is not sustainable.”

While experts debate how much control Iran exerts over the Houthis, the militias increasingly launch explosive-laden drones, previously linked to Tehran, deep inside the kingdom. Those attacks included a drone smashing into a parked commercial airliner and others targeting major oil facilities, temporarily shaking energy prices.

“The US administration’s removal of the Houthis from the (foreign terrorist organisation) list, unfortunately, appears to have been misinterpreted by the Houthis,” the Saudi government said in a statement. “This misreading of the measure has led them, with support from the Iranian regime, to increase hostilities.”

Since the war began, the Houthis have launched over 550 bomb-laden drones and more than 350 ballistic missiles toward Saudi Arabia, the kingdom said. While that has caused damage, injuries and at least one death, the war in Yemen reportedly has seen over 130,000 people killed. Saudi Arabia repeatedly has been criticised internationally for airstrikes killing civilians and embargoes exacerbating hunger in a nation on the brink of famine.

And though Biden has pulled back support, US-made aircraft and munitions sold to Saudi Arabia still target Yemen. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has linked arming the kingdom to America allowing the war to take place.

“I am asking this question to the Americans: Did you know what would happen to the Saudis on the day that you gave them green light to enter the Yemeni war?” Khamenei asked in a March 21 speech. “Did you know that you are sending Saudi Arabia into a quagmire?”

US Middle East deployments

Biden’s efforts to end US involvement in Yemen’s war come as his administration attempts to re-enter Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Indirect talks began Tuesday in Vienna.

“The Iranians are keen to trade in their Yemen card for something more durable,” said Iryani, the Sana’a Centre researcher.

Such a deal might suit American interests. Biden’s Defence Department is looking at redeploying troops, particularly those in the Middle East, amid what experts refer to as the “great powers conflict” America faces with China and Russia.

Pulling troops from the Middle East could bolster forces America may need elsewhere. However, doing so will likely be easier said than done.

In Yemen alone, every American president since George W. Bush has launched drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, long considered by Washington to be the most dangerous offshoot of the militant group. Biden himself has yet to launch any such strikes, though the group still operates in the country’s east.

US troops remain in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, Gulf Arab nations like Saudi Arabia rely on US forces stationed in their countries as a counterweight to Iran.

The US military sent troops to Saudi Arabia in 2019, deploying anti-missile batteries amid tensions with Iran. However, American forces recently downsized that presence.

“The kingdom believes that the US presence in the region can help promote the region’s security and stability by supporting allies who face transnational threats that are primarily sponsored by the Iranian regime,” the Saudi government said. It did not comment specifically on the redeployments.

Overall, American forces will stay in the Mideast as it remains crucial to global energy markets and includes major choke points at sea for trade worldwide, said Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. What those forces look like, however, will change as the US weighs how to counterbalance Iran through a return to the nuclear deal, he said.

“It doesn’t solve the Iranian issue,” Stein added. “It puts us in a place to manage it, like we’re in hospice care.”