Yemen Archives - Arab Digest

A missile launched by Yemen's Ansar Allah (Huthi) movement hit a building owned by Saudi Arabia's state oil company Aramco in the eastern city of Dhahran on Tuesday

The Gulf and the US: shifting sands

Summary: as a consensus emerges that US hegemony in the Gulf is over and Washington continues to cast around for an acceptable exit strategy from the war with Iran, it is none too soon to consider how best the US could safeguard its national interests there into the longer term.

October 15, 2026

Saudi Arabia's energy minister has vowed a "serious" response to the deadly attacks on the kingdom's airports and oil and gas facilities by Yemen's Huthi movement.

Saudi Arabia and the Yemen dilemma

Summary: the Huthi offensive has heightened the challenge Saudi Arabia faces in its efforts to extricate the kingdom from the Yemen quagmire.

October 13, 2026

The Sudanese government has offered Russia a naval base in Port Sudan, an unprecedented perch overlooking critical Red Sea trade routes and Russia’s first naval base in Africa.

The Red Sea’s emerging two-shore axis

Summary: a recent study reveals that Yemen’s Huthis are expanding their networks along the African coast; their recent seizure of the Red Sea coastline has heightened concerns that security in the crucial waterway is now highly compromised.

October 8, 2026

Riyadh's "Suez moment" arrives as Washington scales back its commitments, leaving the Gulf states to face regional rivals without an American shield.

Saudi Arabia’s ‘Suez Moment’

Summary: recent events have forced a recognition that the US hegemony in the Middle East is over. How the inevitable vacuum will be filled remains far from clear. But it is hard to be optimistic in the short to medium-term even though there is surely an opportunity for “a new beginning.”

October 1, 2026

Yemeni civilians in a Djibouti camp after crossing one of the world's most contested waterways, leaving behind looted property and livelihoods amidst collapsing international support.

Yemen’s people bear the brunt of the Huthi war

Summary: the Huthi offensive caught the IRG forces and the Saudis off guard and with rapid advances and the seizure of new territory it is the Yemeni people who yet again pay the price.

September 28, 2026

Saudi Arabia’s military defeat in Yemen has global consequences

Summary: a failed Saudi-backed ground offensive enabled Huthi forces to capture critical Red Sea territory, seize Western weaponry and severely disrupt global energy markets.

September 21, 2026

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune confronts UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the 2024 G7 Summit in Bari. Tebboune's gesture came months after he publicly accused Abu Dhabi of funding regional conflicts, a rift that has now culminated in Algeria severing diplomatic ties.

Algeria-UAE rupture shows a region rearranging its alliances

Summary: Algeria’s severing of diplomatic relations with the UAE is a statement that the North African country has lost patience with what it sees as Abu Dhabi’s meddling in its neighbourhood.

September 18, 2026

A barefoot Huthi fighter inspects the burning remains of a Saudi Akinci drone - costing over $100 million per unit - proving that high-priced hardware is no guarantee of air dominance in Yemen’s asymmetric war.

In case you hadn’t noticed the Yemen civil war is on again

Summary: though it is receiving little international attention the civil war has been ignited by the Huthis with implications that go well beyond the borders of Yemen.

September 1, 2026

Fallen PMF members whose deaths underscore Prime Minister al-Zaidi's high-wire act: reining in autonomous armed factions without triggering a domestic political explosion.

Iraq’s Saudi challenge

Summary: Iraq’s Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi faces a daunting challenge seeking to halt Iranian backed militias from attacking Saudi Arabia while simultaneously encouraging desperately needed Saudi investment.

August 27, 2026

Representatives meet in Damascus to draft Syria’s new anti-money laundering strategy, aiming for international standards while banks manually screen transactions without modern software.

MENA and the flaws in FATF

Summary: five MENA countries are on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey-list “for increased monitoring for strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and counter-proliferation financing frameworks”. Getting off the list may be down more to politics than process.

August 20, 2026

Three’s a crowd, four’s a military liability: Erdoğan, MbS, and Shehbaz Sharif celebrate the new Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, leaving Cairo and its over-diversified, un-interoperable arsenal watching from the sidelines.

Egypt: State & Barracks

Summary: Egypt was left out of the tripartite Mecca Pact signalling military weakness while military industries further strengthen their stranglehold on the economy; a militarised transportation system leaves scores of workers dead and injured; a luxury Mediterranean coastal project launches in the midst of a land compensation battle.

August 18, 2026

The 'Gates of Hell' open both ways: US forces mourn their fallen while Washington prepares to double down on an unwinnable regional escalation.

The slide toward a regional cataclysm

Summary: following the killings of US service members in Jordan and Iraq, a major military escalation between the United States and Iran has collapsed their previous ceasefire agreement, threatening to spark a comprehensive, multi-front war that could devastatingly target civilian infrastructure and choke global energy supplies.

July 21, 2026

Yemen

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