War-ravaged Yemen entered the fifth year of the years-long internal military conflict on Tuesday amid an ongoing escalation in fighting and complete absence of peaceful solutions despite the difficult economic and humanitarian conditions caused by the non-stop violence.
Since March 2015, Yemen has been witnessing intense armed confrontations between the government forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Houthi rebels. After receiving a public request from Hadi, a Saudi-led Arab coalition has been carrying out military operations in Yemen since March 26, 2015, in support of the government forces and confronting the Houthi rebels. The pro-Hadi coalition accuses Iran of supporting the Houthis militarily, a charge repeatedly denied by Tehran.
As the war just entered its fifth year, the military operations started to escalate in various parts of the country with no signs of a peaceful solution to end the crisis in the impoverished Arab country, which the United Nations says is suffering “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”
No clear prospects for a peaceful solution in Yemen as the fighting continues in escalation day after day as a result of the regional interventions that are fueling the conflict, according to Yemeni analysts who spoke to Xinhua.
Nabil al-Bukiri, director of the Arab Forum for Studies and Development, said that “what Yemen is going through today is a war in which foreign powers are largely involved, so it goes on without a horizon and every day grows into more complication.”
“Wars in Yemen are often short and fleeting except for this war that is involving foreign powers may take a long and unspecified period,” said al-Bukiri who is also a prominent Yemeni political writer and analyst.
The UN sponsored a series of rounds of peace consultations between the Yemeni-warring parties, the latest was in last December in Sweden and ended by signing an agreement that called for terminating the military operations in Hodeidah and the withdrawal of warring troops from the strategic city. However, nothing of the agreement’s provisions have been implemented so far.
According to the writer and political analyst Ahmed al-Moayyad, there is an “evasion” of implementing Stockholm’s Peace Agreement, and that’s “an indicator that does not call for optimism in the future of the Yemeni crisis.” –Xinhua
