Isa Blumi - Who are the Houthis? Putting Yemen's War in a Global Context (2021)

Hayat: Dr. Isa Blumi is a historian who does a great job of researching societies in the midst of political and economic transformation. He is associate professor in the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. And he is the author of many articles and seven books, including two really important ones on Yemen, Chaos in Yemen and Destroying Yemen, which is the latest one. Often the tensions in Yemen, and elsewhere for that matter, are explained by fairly superficial emphases on tribal factionalism or sectarianism. Dr. Blumi is committed to a more integrated and interdisciplinary approach to studying history. So today we can look forward to hearing a deeper analysis that weaves in Yemen's relationship with major powers, since the Cold War. And we will see how the devastation of Yemen is impacted by factors such as global capitalism, empire, the war on terror. We really look forward to your talk, Dr. Mluumi. Please go ahead.

Dr. Isa Blumi: Thank you very much, Hayat, and good afternoon to the audience. I'd like to first quickly thank the organizers of this meeting. I'm sorry that I can't meet some of you face to face. Inshallah, at some point in the future, there'll be an opportunity for us to celebrate your successful participation in ending this horrible war. whose time frame certainly begins in 2015, but as I will try to explain as briefly and in an expeditious way as possible, goes back a little bit further. Is it essential that as we continue to try to reach out to the larger world, that we avoid some of the more problematic over simplifications of how such a horrible human catastrophe can actually take place in our midst. It's first and foremost as I proceed to show you some slides that I prepared for this presentation to remember that things are much more complicated than even I can share with you on these slides. What I'm trying to do is at least highlight some possible other angles of analysis that is requisite for us to actually give to people in Yemen the upwards of 20 million people who are living for the last five years in isolation of the larger world, under siege. They are under, of course, constant bombardment, often with Raytheon weapons. built in Massachusetts, but certainly a whole range of external actors have contributed to this human catastrophe. And I also have to emphasize that Yemen, despite the fact that it's been off the radar screen for strategic purposes since the beginning of this war, this is not the only conflict, and this is not the only region in the world that's suffering from these kinds of forces of exploitation of resource extraction and this is something that I think all of us as we pursue a rapid and end to this horrible war in Yemen that we are also aiming for finding kind of a universal resolution to the conditions that leads to such horrible human catastrophes. I will now begin to share with you the slides that I have put together for this presentation and I hope that they're self-explanatory. I will certainly lead us through them as quickly as possible to make my larger points and then I will hopefully have given us the allotted time for Q&A. It's important for us to recall that as we frame this war, it's often framed in terms of it being an internecine war, a war between Yemenis themselves. A civil war is often, it's framed often as a war that engages rival elements. Sometimes it's positioned as a war that has been going on for a very long time. It's often heralded in even academic circles or maybe first and foremost in academic circles as conflicts pitting rival tribal groups or rival sectarian groups. This is very common. approach to accounting for conflict in complex societies like those of Southern Arabia, the larger region, West Asia, North Africa, or what people call the Middle East, or used to call the Middle East. And what this effectively does, it erases the very variant elements that are contributing to conflict poverty to structural impediments to realizing as a sovereign nation, as a sovereign people, their own solutions to immediate problems, whether it be related to feeding themselves, whether it be related to their interactions as cultural actors or commercial exchanges with the larger world. And unfortunately for a place like Southern Arabia, this is a relatively new phenomena. Well, it's a society, it's a part of the world that has been integrated to the larger Indian Ocean world for millennia. We know that people from this part of the world have settled in established communities throughout the Indian Ocean world, again for thousands of years at some point in time at the height of first British capitalist imperialism and then later on in the so-called 20th century modern world a form of relationship that had made Yemen increasingly vulnerable to losing very much its long deserved central place in the human experience if you have the larger world. Evidence of this is again the framing of this current conflict, one that has exonerated to a large extent the biggest players in the world who are the beneficiaries of this constant system persistent system of exploiting the region's natural resources, its human resources, its cultural resources. Framing it in these, as I mentioned before, terms of historical conflicts between rival tribal peoples or rival sects. and more I think useful for in the context of this theme of this presentation, naming the conflict in this very problematic personalized way. We have been in many ways from the late 1990s already been asked to think about resistance and pushback from globalizing economic pressures coming from institutions like the IMF or the World Bank push back from indigenous communities throughout northern parts of Yemen in frames in terms of almost a maniacal subservience to an individual. The individual named Hussein Badr Edina al-Houthi was indeed a very charismatic local politician who helped form a political party when Yemen was unified in 1990-91, struggled for a position in larger Yemeni society as a member of the Al-Haqq party, was a rival to the entrenched political elite, if you will. personified perhaps by Ali Abdullah Saleh, but certainly representative of a much larger infrastructure of exploitation that goes back to 1978 when with likely the help of United States and other European interested parties instill the regime that had since 1978 pushed Yemen towards this subordinate role in the larger world. And so you had pockets of resistance, iterations of frustrations with this long history of Northern Yemen subservience and then larger unified Yemen subservience to global capitalist enterprises of what I call in my book, empire. And so this individual named Houthi was a quite remarkable articulate member of this resistance. uh not an armed resistance until uh basically it was no longer possible to conduct one's affairs at in debates in parliament and try to form political alliances and it ended up being a nasty um let's say policing measure by the central state to try to suppress what had grown to be a very popular uprising against the injustices being imposed on their region, a region that I'll refer to in a second. And its very location is important for us to understand what's happening in Yemen. for the last 20 to 30 years. He and his descendants, he will ultimately die in 2004 being killed by Yemeni, most likely American special forces, was the founder of first a large movement called the Believing Youth, religiously orientated, but not something that was exclusive to his particular religious group, the Zaidi group of Northern Yemen. and made explicitly the efforts of trying to conjoin, form coalitions across ideological lines, across regional and indeed these so-called tribal lines. So effectively creating, and this is why he became identified as such a danger, creating a cross-cultural, a cross-regional alliance that cut across a number of lines and in fact mobilized large numbers of Yemenis, regardless of their religious orientations or their ideological positions, mostly along class lines. And so this movement which has been reduced to basically a fanatical following of a charismatic man like Houthi, It's a tactic, a rhetorical tactic that's used often in the region, in the larger global south, and indeed in American politics. We often hear movements referred to individuals, whether it be in the case of Yemen, the Houthi movement named after this individual who was part of a much larger activist coalition. Similarly, Jamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s and 60s, part of a much more dynamic global enterprise, nevertheless is associated with this brief moment of articulated and collective resistance to global capitalist power in 1950s and early 1960s. And so this is one of the things that I really want to highlight. The Houthis, the so-called Houthis, deserves to be actually put into their various cultural, political, ideological context that they actually inhabit in Yemen. We shouldn't resort to this simple kind of reductive naming of what's happening in Yemen along such lines. So I insisted that the title of the very talk referenced the actual larger coalition that has been formed in this period from 2004 onwards called Ansar Allah. partisans of gods to highlight the fact that this is in fact a movement not based on the charismatic teaching of one man. This is not a fanatical movement that can be reduced to one man and therefore cannot be eliminated. He was indeed killed, but the movement actually expanded and grew, not on the basis of what he taught or what he said, but on the basis of what he helped create, which was a broad coalition of actors. So unfortunately, we are faced with constantly repeating these rather sophisticated tools of rhetoric, of discourse. And again, it's not used exclusively to Yemen. It is used across the world. And it's a very reductive kind of reasoning that leaves us incapable of actually moving beyond the kind of simplistic dualism of the Yemeni state or a coalition of legal backers of the legal government of Yemen fighting against this wacko organization following this man named Houthi. So I would suggest that we move away from, as we talk about Yemen in subsequent days, weeks, and months, to help educate the audience to be a little bit more sensitive to this very tactic. because it's it becomes a very kind of a reductive reasoning that it makes it impossible for us to move beyond the actual analysis of what's going on the ground and indeed this is a big problem regarding Yemen is that there's very little need to actually any longer consult what actual Yemeni actors on the ground. We have now figured out what is actually going on. It's a conflict between Sunnis and Shia. It's a conflict between Iran and the other major aspiring regional powers, Saudi Arabia or Qatar or something like that. And what has been lost is the long structural dynamics that are at play that led to millions of people actually embracing the idea of the need to resist what has been happening to their country. So again, the rationale that's often pitched to the audience in the United States or Europe, I must of course make a note on the aside that it is curious that there's very, very actual coverage of this horrible tragedy in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, when it is, it is actually, it's often treated in this reductive ways. And this is where I want us to proceed by challenging them. I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to quickly go through some of these more complicated points. I briefly make some of these points in other public lectures that are available online or in the book itself, if someone could find it in their local library, if that's any more possible in the United States. What's important again is that there are multiple factors animating those who are opposing what since the 1980s has been very rapid aggressive encroachments of the larger global forces of capital onto first northern Yemen, um a largely agriculturalist society and up until the 1970s 1980s and also by the end of the cold war southern yemen which had long been from the 1960s onwards a marxist state that had long engaged progressive countries throughout the world in an alliance against the North Atlantic capitalist enterprise from the 60s onwards. So these two countries unified by 1990. George H.W. Bush as vice president goes down in 1986, signs a very lucrative oil deal with northern Yemen's leader Ali Abdullah Saleh and begins this process of integrating what was otherwise until then a largely inaccessible resource rich part of the West Asian, North African part of the world. So we need to avoid identifying a very narrow range of adversaries who are coming from very different bases of support and claims to legitimacy. And in order to capture these requires a historical perspective that I provide obviously in much more greater detail in my published work hopefully there'll be some ways for you to access that in time. I'm sorry for the horrible pictures but it's something that we have to constantly remind ourselves that these are human beings for the last five years enduring horrible horrible very cynical tactics of military intimidation, when necessary, mass murder. Shock and awe is the kind of theme that was used in the early 1990s, I believe. Colin Powell, who was just recently talking in Milwaukee, was certainly one of the architects of this new phase of collective punishment of collective terrorization using weapons of mass destruction. And in places, heavily populated areas like Northern Yemen, which is a very mountainous country that depends to a large extent since the 1980s strategic by strategy on importing much of its food a society that has been under siege since 2015 was assumed to be vulnerable to this kind of psychological warfare to this on occasion very brutal use of air power The problem is, as is often discussed in these kinds of contexts, without ground forces, these wars end up dragging on and on and on. And I can't go into the details about the kind of financing of this war and why there's all kinds of pressures to not end the war, even though the countries involved in engaging this war cannot afford They could not afford it even before they started it, but there's some interesting dynamics that actually pushed for this war to take the form it did. The assumption ultimately was that bombing civilians would lead to a very rapid and quick military victory. The problem is that because the people who were offering this advice initially were operating again on these very simplistic terms, that I've just critiqued, referencing the adversaries or the potential adversaries as simple fanatics embracing something called Houthism, that they could easily be subordinated by a couple well-placed bombs or assassinations, which unfortunately the Obama administration made very good use of the drone technology. of that period from the 2000s to 2015 to assassinate community leaders throughout Yemen. That, however, did not suffice in actually subduing this population who had for very obvious and clear reasons nowhere to go but to continue to resist. And this is important for us to understand as we move forward and actually push for some kind of enduring solution. The large number of people who are being targeted and framed in this kind of loose reference to something called Houthis, therefore by extension tools of Iran, which, by the way, has no means to actually, in a sustainable way, support, supply the resistance to this coalition. I can answer maybe more details in Q&A about that. These peoples who are, again, very simplistically addressed in the outside world, identified as kind of a very narrow cluster of fanatics, are actually constitutes the entirety of 18 to 20 million people who have been enduring this situation for now five years and despite all of this they are proving to be incapable of being militarily defeated and that's largely because of the nature of their own coalition that has been forged around this movement called Ansar Allah which is a broad umbrella of various organizations, communities, who see again, they share maybe very little, but they certainly share one common enemy, which is this coalition been put together by the United States, its European allies, and its regional allies. So again, I have to push through this slide. Unfortunately, I can't give you a more detailed history of the nature of this emerging coalition of actors. But as you can see on this map, the concentrated area that are in this area around Saada is the area from which the movement originates. And it's very important to situate this movement where it is geographically. You will note that it's right on the border with Saudi Arabia. And I'll hopefully, within the next couple of minutes, explain why this is important for us to understand the war, its origins, and why it persists, and why it's never going to actually be resolved on a military basis. As you can see on this map on the left, the areas along, I don't know if I can show with my pointer, I don't know if you see it or not, but the areas that you see from Sana'a, colored in dark brown, extends deep into southwest Saudi Arabia. This is all culturally, geographically, for millennia part of a continuum. of a civilization, if you want to be that crass. And you can see in the picture on the right, this is the kind of terrain that extends from basically southern Yemen all the way into the areas just south of Mecca, Medina. And this is culturally been Yemeni. And it's only in 1934 that this northern part of the area that then becomes part of Saudi Arabia, when the House of Saud expands in the 1920s and 1930s with British military assistance and finance to take over what today is Saudi Arabia, A significant portion of this part of Yemen was also secured to be incorporated into the Saud project, which then has large implications over the next several decades. Now this area is never conquered militarily. It's an area that basically Riyadh and whoever's living on the other side of this kind of loosely drawn border throughout this period come to an agreement. Families can still move back and forth. There's commerce. There's plenty of people who go to work in the new booming economy of the Gulf when oil actually becomes a major factor after World War II. It's a convenient kind of relationship that issues are really not present in terms of this is an occupied land of Yemenis. There are no irredentist articulations, certainly in the back of people's minds, but nothing that's organized politically for a long period of time. Now that changes with, unfortunately, a mistake in year 2000 in which they decide under pressure from the United States, there's a whole new movement. The military industrial complex and other related industries have now developed the idea of surveillance. There's a lot of money to build walls to protect countries from outsiders. Obviously, the United States is having its own current fascination with building walls to somehow keep outsiders, unwanted outsiders, from coming in. This was already pushed in the Gulf, in the Arabian Peninsula, and this particular area became a kind of trial run, if you will, for this new phase of interrelationships between countries. They were going to build a militarized border, cutting these traditional links between families and that initiated conflicts over water, over the right of moving of herds for feeding their animals, to conducting trade. And this basically explodes into a campaign to try to suppress the movement that emerges from this reaction. And this is the origins of what we today unfortunately refer to simplistically as the Houthi movement. And very quickly, as you can see in these maps, We don't have much time. I can't go over the whole process after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. It first happens in Yemen. The collective outrage, frustrations over all these years, all these mini wars, attempts by Ali Abdullah Saleh and its American allies and Saudi allies to suppress this resistance popping up in various parts of Yemen. They break through the threshold of national politics form an alliance and actually successfully end up in the streets of major cities in beginning of 2011 and initiate this slow process of the west and regional powers trying to find an alternative to what was really a radical revolution in the weight a radical change of what was happening previous to 2011 in Yemen's relationship with the larger world a reversal if you will of globalization And this is what the Americans and others became extremely nervous about, and they imposed this so-called solution, which would lead eventually by 2014 to yet another attempt by this core group of people in the far north to mobilize this nationwide coalition to remove this puppet of the choice of the United States, European partners and regional allies. And so this is what initiates the more or less campaign from starting from March and April 2015. to try to reverse what was a successful removal of a corrupt regime that the United States, the UN, and others had tried to impose from 2012 up until the end of 2014. Here is a quick timeline of all this process. This is the immediate period after the spring. Then this is the issue that really leads to the break apart of that interim phase that the Obama administration was trying to usher in that would put new pressures on Yemen to open up to the larger global economy. So under this man who is depicted here, vice president for some 20 years under Ali Abdullah Saleh, handpicked by the United States and Saudi Arabia and others to lead the so-called interim period, signs Yemen, for instance, to the WTO. And that's the push of all kinds of structural adjustment and we're using this as a euphemism of course that the IMF is demanding of this new interim government that will basically for Yemenis as they can see now in the immediate future leads to completely losing any sovereignty they have, and economic subordination, much of their assets would be going private, much of the state-owned properties would be sold off, and more importantly, the oil, gas, and offshore fisheries would be sold off to the lowest bidder, to those very corrupted corporations that had links to Washington, to London, and elsewhere. And sadly, this was all very much avoidable even after the so-called Houthis. Ansar Allah and his larger coalition successfully removes from power this UN American-imposed interim government in late 2014, Jamal Bonomar, Algerian diplomat sent to Yemen to try to resolve this, did say that there was, even at the very last minute, an agreement. And the agreement, unfortunately, meant that they had to basically go back to square one. which meant that all those actions they tried to shut out in 2011 were back in the negotiation table where they had been shut out because of this larger intervention by the UN, the United States and regional powers. And so I'm going to quickly now give us a little more slides, but clearly there are a number of forces that are going to benefit from this sudden choice to go and try to impose a return of this interim Hadi government. And one segment of the global economy is the military industrial complex, who would see immediate windfalls from this ratcheting up of purchases of weapons of mass destruction. This was one of the main reasons why the interim government had to go is because they basically came to an agreement to divide up Yemen into six federated zones that would have basically meant the large amount of the wealth of Yemen, which is in this far right region, the oil, gas and the fisheries would basically be in the hands of a population of that numbers less than a million and the majority of the 30 plus million people would live in perpetual poverty and have no access to the revenues produced by the oil, gas and fisheries resources that this one narrow region to the far right would actually have full control over. this federation was a disaster from the beginning. And if you actually look at the United Nations, especially under Obama, but under, of course, Trump as well, and previous Bush administrations, this whole idea of federating and loosening the power of the central state in many of these post-Soviet societies, as well as throughout Africa and West Asia, you see that this is a pattern that is not acceptable for most people and leads to further conflict. People are just not going to accept to see the larger society's resources being allocated to the areas where there's least likely to be any pushback from globalizing forces. Very quickly, another major actor that was actually in alliance with these northern so-called Houthi groups throughout this period up until 2015, whereas the remnants of the southern Yemeni Marxist state, the Intelligentsia, were very much sharing concerns of what was happening to Yemen throughout the 2000s and then were in support of the revolution of 2011 and also formed an alliance briefly to take power away from this American UN-imposed interim government under Hadi. because they too saw with great concern that Yemen was being parceled off and sold off to the lowest bidder, to the cronies of Washington, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, et cetera. Unfortunately for the larger conflict, a large segment of this movement moved off into form its own military. It received resources from rival factions within this larger coalition, and it's been pushing for complete independence, basically a return to an independent southern Yemen since this period. And this is where one of the major factors that now leads to this map, that this is how the map looked like in mid-2015. Again, this broad coalition had been able to secure much of traditionally northern Yemen and even the old capital of southern Yemen, Aden. Now, this was reversed by heavy investment in furthering the capacities of this so-called coalition. It's most likely that not only were mercenaries from Colombia and Sudan and other, let's say, countries willing to provide manpower, but also mercenaries from Australia, the United States, NATO countries did come and did somewhat reverse the territorial makeup of this conflict. So this is where we are more or less till today. And you can see there's different colorations, which basically suggests that there's actually multiplicity of actors with very different agendas pushing for territorial either partition of southern Arabia to suit their own interests. It's not likely that we're going to see any reasonable push to actually militarily conquer the highlands of Yemen, which no armies have ever been able to do for 3,000 years and it's not going to happen under this coalition. They will use their air power to destroy dams to destroy capacity to feed themselves. They've been very cynical in that regard, blowing up storage areas, blowing up wells, blowing up dams. We've just had horrible monsoons in this region that because they no longer have the dams that had historically kept the rain waters from flooding all at the same time much of sana has been flooded much of the the historic old center has been flooded and damaged with many horrible buildings thousands of people have died and more importantly the farmlands that they had been cultivating to feed this upwards of 20 million people who are now in complete isolation for five years has once again faced the catastrophe I'm sorry I'm going a little bit overboard with time, but this is one of the reasons why Yemen is such a place, corner of intrigue and violence, unfortunately, and it extends to the Horn of Africa as well. The larger regional context is and will continue to be oil, gas, And as you can see, Somalia, which has faced a similar kind of fate in the 1990s of partitions and war and occupation, you can see that Yemen and Somalia actually share the same geography, the same geological matrix, if you will, that makes these places incredibly wealthy with oil resources and gas resources that have yet been tapped for a number of historical reasons over the course of the 20th century. But in the next phase, when oil is depleted, as it most likely is already in large parts of Saudi Arabia, they'll have to actually exploit these places that had long been inaccessible for political reasons, or because its prices, it was too expensive to exploit these resources. The time in the next 20, 30 years, however, these will be the big suppliers of global energy. whoever controls it will have again just like over the last 50 years with the Gulf control over much of the world's dynamics whether in direction so unfortunately there is a rather crass rationale for violence it goes back to some of the same reasons why we've had war over the last 250 years in the larger world it is not about tribal hatreds and inter sectarian battles they've been taking place for thousands of years it's in many ways what you guys are protesting in Massachusetts is the origin of this war what you guys are trying to address with your your your pressure on Raytheon, on politicians, is really what's going to stop this war. The push factors, the energy behind this war is actually coming, unfortunately, from global markets, whether it be in the City of London, Wall Street, and their subservient politicians, be it at the local level in Boston or in Washington DC and elsewhere. So I will leave it at that.

Hayat: Thank you, Dr. Blumey. This was really, really a powerful presentation. What I'm kind of experiencing is the reality is how much of global history is invisible to us. For example, the whole situation in Somalia, hardly anyone's even mentioning it, but it's not that far apart from what you've just described. So thank you very much for helping us to maybe just get our toes into the water to understand the full context of this.

Speaker 3: In the talk, did you say that Iran has nothing to do with this war in Yemen? And secondly, I understand that Israel is bombing Yemen now, along with Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and of course Palestine.

Dr. Isa Blumi: The first question is, I think there's been a lot of frustration that there has not been more overt solidarity, gestures of solidarity. There's very little that practically any country could do to supply uh the uh those who are uh fighting this coalition just by sheer geography that it is completely surrounded by coalition navies air forces uh the united states is participating along with other countries to try to maintain a full embargo on the entirety of the country which is kind of ridiculous of course because the areas that are under the control of various factions of the coalitions are getting all the supplies they need. There may be some incremental, especially in manpower and tacticians who have infiltrated, but when we see missiles fired from northern Yemen into Saudi Arabia, For instance, these are actually re-engineered weapons that had belonged to a very powerful Yemeni military that had been busy buying weapons under the previous regime for decades from the same companies that are getting handsomely paid for their weapons to the coalition that's bombing them. And because many of these military men quickly joined out of frustration, out of national pride, out of patriotism, the coalition, sorry, the Ansar Allah larger movements to remove these outsiders from basically pushing the agenda of their much hated neighbors to the north. they very quickly just took their skill set and reapplied it to not only protecting and defending this concentrated area of northern Yemen, but also militarily challenging this seemingly, on paper at least, far superior coalition of 20 countries with of course American-British technical backing. So unfortunately for the narrative, it does get reduced to that Iran is the only reason we can account for why they've been able to survive and push back is because of the Iranians, which just doesn't prove itself to be in any ways a reality. Again, some people may have snuck their way into the north to help technically. But it's Yemenis who are dying, it's Yemenis who are actually re-engineering their former air-to-air missiles or their former ground-to-air missiles to be using them into a new generation of indigenous weapons that are fighting back to the great frustration of their adversaries. Now, if Iran were, in fact, supplying weapons, I think the first thing that they would have supplied is anti-aircraft weapons, which clearly is not available to northern Yemenis, the 18 to 20 million people who have to live on a day-to-day basis to basically open skies warfare. So on the other question, yes, the big elephant in the larger room, of course, remains an interested party. supplying the kinds of technical assistance. Maybe even some experimental weapons were used at the very beginning, bunker buster bombs that you can see if you look up on YouTube, some quite horrifying new kinds of weapons. Some people speculate there was actually some kind of low grade nuclear weapons that were used as an experimental level to destroy many of Northern Yemen's militaries. assets which were embedded in the mountains that were surrounding this city of Sana'a. And since then, I don't think that we've had a couple of soldiers, whether they were mercenaries or not is another thing, but who did have passports or IDs from Israel. But there are a lot of companies involved in providing weapons and training for the ground troops of this larger coalition. these countries that are supposedly fighting against Northern Yemen are not sending their own troops per se. They're mostly hiring mercenaries, mostly poor Yemenis, mostly poor Sudanese or from Chad or from other countries who need to be trained in this new kind of weapons. And so they're getting trained by, by companies that have been outsourced, Saudi coalition outsource these companies. And you find them, they're easy to find. Many of them are in secret, but they are often easily discovered. And so that's another aspect of the global war economy, if you will, the business of war. The United States military has outsourced a great deal of its, Dick Cheney was very notorious for creating huge market niches for private companies, his own, for instance. And the same applies to these kinds of wars. So yes, there are a lot of Israeli players in the global market for war. And whether or not that's part of his policy, I'm pretty certain it is. But I think that's something that needs to be explored further. But good questions. And the moral of the story is that, unfortunately, the northern Yemenis are on their own. Thank you. There's no help coming from anywhere.

Speaker 4: Thank you for putting this on. And thank you, Isa. I've been trying to connect with you. Maybe we can do that after. But the only way I can see this ending is if Ansarullah has more military success, which then forces the coalition back to come to some kind of deal unless or in concert with whatever we are able to do here, which so far hasn't been very much. I mean, is that what you see, like in terms of scenarios that this war could end after five years? Is this going to be going on, do you think, for another 10 or 20 years? How do you see this ending?

Dr. Isa Blumi: At the end of my book, I predict that this war will likely see the end of at least one of the regimes in the larger region that is actually persecuting this war. They were already in financial straits before the war started. And in many ways, that was one of their main objectives. intentions was to secure Yemen's resources and assets, they thought for relatively cheap. They were advised that it would actually be an easy or a walk over and didn't prove that way. Now, who would likely encourage countries with not necessarily cash, but certainly lots of resources that could then be sold for cheap in order to keep now a war, a kind of a Vietnam kind of scenario at play. Unfortunately for those who are actually participating where they cannot afford to stop this war. And I think Donald Trump, I showed you a picture of his very notorious meeting in 2017, his first visit to the region. And he very bluntly said that, look, I don't really give a damn for any of you. And none of you would be in power for more than two weeks unless we kept you in power. Now, what I expect from all of you is to basically start paying up and paying American corporations, especially military industrial complex, what is owed to them.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Dr. Isa Blumi: And he's basically put all these countries into a corner. And they are buying American. And you'll notice that a lot of other countries that had long provided certain kinds of services in the military context, or even in civilian context, who were willing to look the other way and accept credit in the past can no longer do so. Many a company, especially in Saudi Arabia, have gone bankrupt because they haven't been paid by the government. Even the bin Laden group, most notorious for one of the sons of the bin Laden group, has gone bankrupt because the government was not paying its bills. And this is before the war of 2015. So what's going to end this war is very much what Donald Trump in some weird way has predicted. there will only be one of you standing or two of you standing. And then you will come to a very different set of arrangements with your neighbors. But until then, we're going to milk this war. We're going to make you guys pay for it. You're going to pay cash. So what you have is you have the countries that are waging this war liquidating their assets. In many cases, princes are being arrested, their bank accounts frozen, people are now being forced to pay taxes in these countries, VAT taxes are now tripled in Saudi Arabia over the last two or three years. In the meantime, they're desperately trying to market that they've become modern and women are allowed to drive and they're getting CNN to come in and give them these poo-poo things and It's not working. They can't find money. No one wants to invest in this kind of speculative economy anymore. No one wants to build new cities in the desert or casinos on the Red Sea as they were envisioning doing. 2030 is finished. And so this war is going to end when these guys who are waging the war can no longer afford it. It's not going to be a military victory. Now, there are some on the ground, some rather dramatic victories going on right now. Thousands of square kilometers have been won by the northern state. Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Speaker 4: Is there a prospect for a military victory by their side?

Dr. Isa Blumi: But what are they going to do? Occupy land, occupy their homelands? Maybe some of those who are kind of sitting on the sidelines will join with them. But again, the end result is the continued air campaign, more embargoes. So this will have to end, unfortunately, from the aggressor side. And the United States is certainly facilitating this. The companies that are making money off this war are making money hand over fist. They're getting still paid in cash. They're not going to accept credit from Riyadh anymore. And in a very astute, very businessman kind of way, you know, Trump knows how this plays. He did property and casinos in some of the most corrupt cities in the United States and around the world. He knows how this works. And he actually does not have a, he doesn't have, he hasn't picked sides, if you will, unlike the other previous regime. which was very close with Qatar, unfortunately. And Qatar is still a big player in this war, unfortunately, as well. And no one's paying attention to it, largely because Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye and Washington Post all have interesting, incestuous relationship that extends back to the early 2000s already.

Omar: Thank you so much. This is Omar. I'm actually from Yemen. Yeah, I'm really, really glad to know that there are some concerns about Yemen and this discussion on this level on the international stage. And they actually share our feelings and our suffer. The question that I would like to raise, I mean, all the presentation today was actually put perfectly and it hit all the points. One thing happened recently, Israel and Arab countries like Emirates, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia are actually running into normalizing the relationship with Israel. For what reason? I mean, we understand that Israel is a big player and is a big problem actually in the region. But we don't understand why Arab countries like these are actually running rapidly now towards normalizing relationship with Israel.

Dr. Isa Blumi: and by the way this relationship has gone back a long time it's it's it was kind of an uh an open secret uh for a long time that it's a major player uh has major very powerful allies and it's basically impossible to be impervious to that kind of pressure with the exception of a couple of countries including uh with the frustrated um in a frustrated way uh northern yemen has demonstrated a great deal of solidarity for a lot of global movements it's very interesting if you look at the demonstrations uh they're very keen um observers of the larger world and they'll make references to venezuela they'll make references to beli to what the coup in bolivia they make references to to past struggles throughout the 20th century. And it's a tactic that we have to appreciate that Yemen unfortunately has been isolated for the wrong reasons. And people in the larger world need to show solidarity because they share the same plight. what happened in Bolivia or what happened in the lake districts of East Africa or Central Africa is what's happening to Yemen for the last five years. It's what happened to Somalia over the 1990s. And until we start to recognize, and the Yemenis again do recognize this, that they are part of a larger global problem. And until people around the world with shared ideas and concerns and frustrations, common enemies, if you will, embrace and fight on their behalf, They will remain isolated. Too many people will die, starve to death, die of disease. But the Yemenis are remarkable people. They will survive this. And they will make amends with those they've been fighting. We know that many, many Yemenis who are armed by this coalition don't fight with vigor. They shoot above their heads. They very easily abandon their posts. The weapons then end up in the hands of those who are willing to then use them to protect their country. There's always a future for Yemen. It's just, I mean, how much more time and suffering do we allow for this to happen? And unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, it's not gonna end before London, New York, and by that, I mean also Washington DC and other actors in North Atlantic world put a stop to this. They're just making too much money right now. They are profiting from a dramatic shift in the global economy. We are experiencing it through the filter of the coronavirus. But underneath the surface, there was a dramatic economic catastrophe that has been happening at least since March of 2020, from the transfer of wealth to 10 individuals, which is getting some news, I believe, in the United States. But this is only possible when countries like Yemen or Congo are subordinated and its resources and its human beings are destroyed. And that's the hence the title of the book that I wrote. It's in solidarity and the wish and desire that people around the world recognize that their struggle is also Yemeni struggle.