The fall of Bayhan... the straw that redrawn the map of war and peace in Yemen
English - Tuesday 12 April 2022 الساعة 01:13 pm
Taiz, NewsYemen, special:
At dawn last Thursday, Yemenis were surprised by the scene of the curtain coming down on President Hadi's rule with accelerating events that began with the man's announcement of the dismissal of his deputy, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, followed by his appearance on television reciting his decision to transfer his powers to a presidential council consisting of a president and 7 members.
The scene concluded with a short video clip of Hadi shaking hands with council members and a kiss on the head by his successor in office Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Presidential Leadership Council, who then moved with council members to meet with the Saudi Crown Prince, as an official announcement from Riyadh to turn Hadi and his deputy page.
Dramatic scenes that were not expected to take place so quickly, despite the growing consensus within the anti-Houthi forces about the need to bring about a comprehensive change within the structure of legitimacy and its leaders, precisely because that is the main reason for the failure to resolve the battle against the Houthi group, Iran's arm in Yemen for seven years.
Although the manifestations of this failure emerged since the second year of the war and continued for the next five years at various levels, especially on the military side, with the fronts halting and then falling into the hands of Al-Houthi, but the calls for reforming the performance of legitimacy did not fall on deaf ears and were faced with a fierce campaign and considered calls to split the ranks.
With the advent of the third year, the balance of power began to change on the ground in favor of the Houthis, with the battle of Hodeidah stopping as a result of the Sweden agreement, to begin with it the series of collapse of the fronts affiliated with legitimacy in the north, coinciding with the outbreak of conflict in the liberated southern governorates between legitimacy and the transitional.
The Saudi-led coalition tried to avoid the matter through the Riyadh Agreement signed between the legitimacy and the Transitional Council in late 2019, in an effort to reunite the anti-Houthi group, but efforts to implement the terms of the agreement failed for nearly two years.
The reasons for this failure were acknowledged by the leader of the Southern Transitional Council, Muhammad al-Ghaithi, in a statement in late March, that the failure was due to the fact that the agreement was limited to partnership in the government and its texts did not include partnership in the presidency, the center of decision within legitimacy.
The failure was not limited to the military side, but the most dangerous issue was the economic failure to stop the collapse of the local currency against hard currencies due to the conflict and the interactions that the liberated areas have experienced for years, which brought the situation to a point threatening to explode due to the accumulation of popular anger over the deterioration of the economy and services.
The pivotal point came with the 7th anniversary of the fall of Sanaa in the hands of the Houthis in September of 2014, for the group to celebrate a free military victory given to it by legitimacy with a suspicious fall of its fronts in Al-Bayda and then the western Bayhan districts in Shabwa, as the Houthi militia invaded the Murad tribes areas and reached the last lines of defense for The city of Ma'rib and the Safer fields, which are the Balk Mountains.
The possibility of the fall of the city of Ma’rib and the Safir fields emerged as a catastrophic scenario in the course of the war in Yemen for the Houthis’ opponents and the coalition. Rather, it represents “the loss of war and the loss of security and stability in the region,” according to a Saudi official’s description of the American Wall Street Journal.
What further complicated the situation is the intransigence shown by the Houthi group towards the initiative put forward by Saudi Arabia in March of last year to end the war in Yemen, despite the efforts made by the Sultanate of Oman to convince them of it. The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, came out last November and declared that The situation in Yemen has reached a political and military impasse.
The blockage of the road, as described by the Saudi Foreign Minister, was not out of frustration, but rather an indication of a comprehensive change in dealing with the Yemeni file by Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Arab coalition, where the statement coincided with a remarkable military step by the joint forces on the western coast repositioning and withdrawing from the areas that It remained restricted due to the Sweden agreement.
Despite the ridicule with which this step was met, it later became clear that its goal was to move the military scene in Yemen and moved the forces restricted by the Sweden agreement to other open fronts in the face of Houthi, which was achieved at the beginning of this year by launching Operation Cyclone of the South by the forces of the southern giants and managed within less than From a month of editing the districts of Bayhan in Shabwa and Harib in Ma'rib.
Operation Southern Cyclone represented a resounding defeat for the Houthi group, which was recognized by its leader and overthrew its dream and the dream of Iran, which vowed through its media to celebrate the control of Ma’rib last Ramadan, and forced it in late March to accept the United Nations initiative for an unconditional ceasefire, although its terms are not much different from the initiative that It was introduced by Saudi Arabia about a year ago.
On the other hand, Operation Southern Cyclone represented a return to the Emirati role in Yemen and an indication of a change in Saudi dealings with the file in Yemen, and its orientation towards bringing about a comprehensive change in the entity of legitimacy and rearranging the scene in the liberated governorates, and this was embodied by the call for consultations in Riyadh by the Gulf Cooperation Council which concluded with the formation of the Presidential Leadership Council and the closing of the curtain on the era of Hadi and his deputy Al-Ahmar.
