https://apnews.com/article/biden-end-support-saudi-offenseive-yemen-b68f58493dbfc530b9fcfdb80a13098f
Biden ending US support for Saudi-led offensive in Yemen
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER19 minutes ago February 4, 2021
President Joe Biden announced Thursday the United States was
ending support for a grinding five-year Saudi-led military offensive in Yemen
that has deepened suffering in the Arabian peninsula’s poorest country, calling
the move part of restoring a U.S. emphasis on diplomacy, democracy and human
rights.
“The war has
created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe,” Biden told diplomats in his
first visit to the State Department as president. ”This war has to end.”
The Yemen
reversal is one of a series of changes Biden laid out Thursday that he said
would be part of a course correction for U.S. foreign policy. That’s after
President Donald Trump — and some Republican and Democratic administrations
before his — often aided authoritarian leaders abroad in the name of stability.
The
announcement on Yemen fulfills a campaign pledge. But it also shows Biden
putting the spotlight on a major humanitarian crisis that the United States has
helped aggravate. The reversing of policy also comes as a rebuke to Saudi
Arabia, a global oil giant and U.S. strategic partner.
The ending
of U.S. support for the offensive will not affect any U.S. operations against
the Yemen-based al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, group, national
security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
Biden also
announced an end to “relevant” U.S. arms sales but gave no immediate details on
what that would mean. The administration already has said it was pausing some
of the billions of dollars in arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s main partner in its Yemeni offensive.
While
withdrawing support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen, the Biden administration
said it intends to help the kingdom boost its defenses against any further
attacks from Yemen’s Houthis or outside adversaries. The assurance is seen as
part of an effort to persuade Saudi Arabia and other combatants to end the
conflict overall.
Saudi
Arabia’s top officials made no immediate public response. They have offered a
series of conciliatory gestures and remarks since Biden’s election, seeking to
soothe the 75-year-old relationship with the United States.
Yemen, the
biblical kingdom of Sheba, has one of the world’s oldest constantly occupied
cities — the more than 2,000-year-old Sanaa — along with mud brick skyscrapers
and hauntingly beautiful landscapes of steep, arid mountains. But decades of
Yemeni misgovernment have worsened factional divisions and halted development,
and years of conflict have now drawn in intervention by Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates and Iran, which officials say has lent increasing support
to the Houthis.
The Obama
administration in 2015 gave its approval to Saudi Arabia leading a cross-border
air campaign targeting the Houthi rebels, who had seized Sanaa and other
territory and were sporadically launching missiles into Saudi Arabia.
U.S.
targeting assistance to Saudi Arabia’s command-and-control was supposed to
minimize civilian casualties in airstrikes. But Saudi-led strikes since then
have killed numerous Yemeni civilians, including schoolboys on a bus and
fishermen in their boats. Survivors display fragments showing the bombs to be
American-made.
The Saudi-led
campaign, joined primarily by the United Arab Emirates, another Gulf country,
has only “perpetuated a civil war in Yemen” and “led to a humanitarian crisis,”
Sullivan said. U.S. officials have already notified senior officials for those
two countries to explain the rationale for the withdrawal of support, he said.
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on Yemen rebels
The stalled
war has failed to dislodge the Houthis and is helping deepen hunger and
poverty. International rights experts say both the Gulf countries and Houthis
have committed severe rights abuses.
Yemeni
activist Tawakkol Karman, a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her
role in Yemen’s unsuccessful Arab Spring popular uprising, urged Biden to stay
involved in Yemen peace efforts.
“Deeper U.S.
engagement — and a refusal to side with dictators who have chosen bloodshed
over democratic change — is vital so that the Yemeni people can return to the
project of democracy” that warring parties inside and outside of Yemen
interrupted, Karman said in a statement.
Biden called
Thursday for a cease-fire, an opening of humanitarian channels to allow more
delivery of aid, and a return to long-stalled peace talks.
The
weeks-old Biden administration has made clear that shifting its stance toward
the Yemen war, and toward Saudi Arabia over the Yemen offensive and other
rights abuses, was a priority. Other measures have included a review of the
Trump administration’s categorization of the Houthis as a terror group. Critics
say the designation hinders delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemenis.
Full Coverage: World News
Biden also
announced the choice of Timothy Lenderking as special envoy to Yemen.
Lenderking
has been a deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department’s Middle
East section. A career foreign service member, he has served in Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
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