On March 25 – the sixth anniversary of the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen – Tariq Saleh, the nephew of Yemen’s late former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the head of the National Resistance Forces, announced that he was forming a “political bureau.” Saleh’s announcement, which followed the appointment of a U.S. special envoy for Yemen in February and a concentrated push from the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to end the war, is an attempt to make sure that his presence on the battlefield is not ignored at the negotiating table.
In many ways, this is the key challenge to ending the war in Yemen: how to accommodate a number of different actors with widely divergent political goals. What started as mainly a two-sided war between the Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition in support of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government in 2015 has not remained that way. Yemen has fractured and fragmented as new political groups have formed, old alliances have shifted, and armed groups have multiplied. Six years into the war, Yemen is Humpty Dumpty after his great fall: broken and impossible to put back together again.
In 2015, Tariq Saleh was in Sanaa, fighting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen’s United Nations-recognized government alongside the Houthis. Today, he is on the other side, drawing financial and military support from Saudi Arabia and the UAE while fighting against the Houthis.
Saleh’s shift is emblematic of how the war has created new and more complicated realities in Yemen. In 2014, Tariq’s uncle, Ali Abdullah Saleh, facilitated the Houthis’ takeover of Sanaa as a way of getting revenge on former allies – such as Hadi and Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar – who had defected and forced him to step down from the presidency two years earlier in reaction to Yemen’s Arab Spring protests. The decision to take action against his enemies of the moment forced Saleh to make common cause with an enemy of the past: the Houthis. Saleh and the Houthis had fought six consecutive wars against one another between 2004 and 2010. But in 2014, Saleh and the Houthis put aside past differences and formed an alliance to rule Sanaa and much of Yemen’s northern highlands.
The Houthi-Saleh alliance lasted three years. At its peak, in mid-2016, the two sides formed a 10-person Supreme Political Council to govern the north, with Saleh and the Houthis each nominating 5 members. Republican Guard soldiers who had remained loyal to Saleh fought alongside Houthi units, and Tariq Saleh, who had emerged as his uncle’s primary military commander, strategized with his Houthi counterparts.
Then, in late 2017, the alliance collapsed in dramatic fashion. Ali Abdullah Saleh, weakened by years of U.N. sanctions, attempted to break free of the Houthis, publicly reaching out to Saudi Arabia. The Houthis reacted strongly, besieging Saleh in one of his compounds, cutting off the city to prevent tribal allies from reaching the former president, and eventually killing Saleh after days of street fighting. Tariq Saleh, who was with his uncle during his final days, somehow managed to escape Sanaa. (He has been relatively tight-lipped about how he pulled this off.) The Houthis, however, did manage to capture both Tariq Saleh’s eldest son, Afaash, as well as one of his brothers, Mohammed, both of whom they still hold.
Over the next two years, Tariq Saleh slowly reconstituted a military force, which he dubbed the National Resistance Forces, transforming his initial nucleus of 3,000 fighters into roughly 20,000, thanks in large part to the military backing of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Today, Saleh and his fighters are based in the Red Sea port city of Mokha, where they are aligned against Houthi fighters up the coast in Hodeidah.
Saleh, however, is far from the only actor outside of Hadi and the Houthis that international negotiators will need to accommodate if they want to construct a lasting peace in Yemen. There is also the Southern Transitional Council, which didn’t exist in 2015, but by 2019 the STC held President Hadi’s temporary capital of Aden, a city it continues to control.
The STC advocates for an independent south Yemen and is backed by a number of affiliated military units, many of which were established, trained, and armed by the UAE. Convincing the STC to give up its dream of an independent state will not be easy, but ignoring STC desires or denying it a seat at the negotiating table is a nonstarter. The STC, by virtue of both its support in the south as well as its affiliated fighters, has an effective veto over the peace process. It can subvert any settlement it feels does not adequately represent its interests.
There are similar issues in Marib, Shabwa, and Hadramout. These governorates, Yemen’s so-called “triangle of power,” account for most of Yemen’s oil and gas exports. All three governorates have also acquired a significant degree of political and economic autonomy over the course of the war, as roughly 20% of oil and gas revenue is now channeled back to local governments, instead of being deposited with the central government like it was before the war. Perhaps nowhere is this more acute than in Hadramout, which has long advocated for greater local rule.
Six years of war have broken Yemen and fractured the country’s political landscape. In 2016, it was possible for peace talks in Kuwait to be held between Hadi’s government and the Houthis. Such a two-party approach is no longer possible. Today, mediators have to shuttle back-and-forth among Hadi, the Houthis, and the STC, as well as the Saudis and Emiratis.
Tariq Saleh’s announcement makes clear that he wants to be added to that list. Constructing a deal that satisfies all these various parties is an incredibly challenging task as three successive U.N. special envoys can attest. But if the two-party talks of 2016 are not possible in 2021, the three- or four-party talks of 2021 will not be possible in 2023. The longer the war in Yemen continues, the more groups will emerge, and the harder the conflict will be to resolve.
