 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hardly a week goes by without alarming news coming from Yemen. The UN has reiterated time and again that the country is undergoing the worst humanitarian disaster of the century. Millions are on the verge of starvation even as aid has been hit due to the ongoing war. From the beginning of the year, a new wave of attacks have broken out which is distinguished by the role of the UAE. Forces backed by the Emiratis have won various victories on the battlefield and the Houthis have carried out attacks against the UAE. A lot of the western media has portrayed the Houthis as terrorists or mere Iranian proxies without analyzing the nature of the war in Yemen which has been going on for eight years. Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News analyzes the recent conflict. So we've just entered the seventh year of this devastating war on Yemen which is the poorest country in the Middle East. It was a war that was initiated by Saudi Arabia, Yemen's neighbor back in 2015 in an effort to try to gain control over who would be in charge of Yemen. Saudi Arabia got the US's backing and support for this war as well as the support and backing of the United Kingdom as well as the support and backing of the Gulf states in the region including the Emiratis who were involved early on. Now things have continued to deteriorate in Yemen over these past seven years when Saudi Arabia first initiated this war. They did it claiming that they could defeat the Houthis and do what they wanted to do within the course of six weeks. And seven years later Saudi Arabia, the richest country, one might say in the region, has yet to be able to defeat what is really like a ragtag group of Yemenis who don't have helicopters, they don't have fighter jets. All they have is basically like homemade rockets. So it's amazing that seven years later the Saudis haven't been able to win. What happened recently though was that for a while, I mentioned the Emiratis were participating, but for a while the Emiratis actually stopped direct involvement in the war on Yemen. But recently they started to back this militia inside Yemen to push the Houthis out of an important province called Shabwa to help the Saudis defeat the Houthis. And this was a very important province. So in response to the Emiratis' involvement, the Houthis hit back at the Emiratis specifically at Abu Dhabi and managed to do quite a bit of damage and kill a couple people. And so that's why everybody has been freaking out in recent weeks. There's never been a break on the other side. The Yemenis have been being bombed and massacred all seven years. The only time it really makes the news is when the Yemenis managed to hit back at either the Saudis or the Emiratis. So the point of all this is to say is that the Houthis are showing that there's a price to pay for intervening in Yemen and that the Yemenis can and will hit back. And in this case, hurt the Emiratis' very delicate economic model. And their economic model is basically one that's relying on the notion that they're this island of stability for investment and transportation and money laundering, this island of stability in a very conflict-ridden region. And that idea of the Emirates goes away. It disappears if they're being bombed. People don't go there to visit or live in the Emirates so they can hide and bomb shelters. In fact, many people who live there have relocated from other conflict-stricken countries in the Middle East so they can be happy and prosperous without having to worry about war. So the bigger story here though is that Yemen has been experiencing this devastating war for seven years. And again, the richest countries in the region have been destroying the poorest country in the region. And they're doing it for a few reasons. One is that Yemen is strategically located next to Babel Mandib, which is a very important international oil shipping route. It always goes back to oil. But Yemen also borders Saudi Arabia and the Saudis are obsessed with controlling the region and not allowing what they perceive to be so-called allies of Iran to be their neighbors. And while the Houthis are of course Yemeni and they're an organic Yemeni movement, they're in charge of much of the country at this point, they also happen to be allied with Iran and what's considered the resistance axis across the region. But I just want to clarify they're not in Iranian proxy, which is what the Saudis and the Americans claim. But that said, for this region reason, this is why Saudi Arabia is obsessed with this ongoing war in Yemen and also Saudi Arabia doesn't want to admit defeat. So that's why they've been continuing to destroy this country for seven years. Meanwhile, I just want to point out that a child in Yemen dies every 10 minutes and I'm speaking about children under the age of five. Millions are food insecure and facing famine-like conditions because of the air, land, and sea blockade that is being carried out by the Saudis, but that the US is absolutely complicit in. And despite campaigning against this war, Joe Biden has changed nothing about the actual facts on the ground. The Biden administration did take the Houthis off the terrorism list when they first came into office. And that was something that Trump added them to the terrorist list at the last minute before leaving office as a gift to Saudi friends. So Biden undid that and did change some of the language surrounding this war, basically saying they would only sell so-called defensive weapons to Saudi Arabia rather than offensive weapons. But this actually hasn't changed anything because the US continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia just under the guise of defensive weaponry, continues to give them cover internationally, continues to offer them logistical support. This war could not continue to take place without the ongoing practically unconditional support from the US. And it's really ironic because right now the US is panicking about this looming Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's all we're hearing about in the news. There's no evidence there's going to be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even the pro-West Ukrainian government is saying as much that there's no evidence. Meanwhile, we have hard actual evidence of ongoing war crimes, routine massacres against the Yemenis by America's greatest ally in the Middle East. And there is zero concern for this and zero accountability. Throughout the course of the war, they have been constant attempts to push back against the support of the US, UK and Western countries to the war. Both political movements and rights organizations have sought to pressure governments to cut down and support to the Saudi-backed alliance. How successful have these pressure campaigns been? There has been some pushback both inside the US and internationally. Speaking of the US context, there's been many activist groups, anti-war groups pushing Congress to stop supporting this war. And there has been some success in terms of getting certain members of Congress to back and end this war. Bernie Sanders has been one of those people. Chris Murphy has been one of those people trying to restrict weapons to Saudi Arabia. But at the end of the day, this hasn't really worked. Nothing has actually changed. It's a very slow process. As you know, inside the United States, it's almost always a deadlock and it's very difficult to really push back against weapon sales in a country that our entire economy is just dependent on selling weapons because you have not just the weapons industry lobby that spends a lot of money making sure that senators and representatives are in their pockets, but you also have a great deal of lobbying directly by the Saudis and Emiratis, as well as an entire think tank industry in Washington, DC, made up of people who work at think tanks that receive a significant amount of funding, millions and millions of dollars from the Emiratis and from the Saudis. So this is one of the, I think, biggest challenges to dealing with this issue domestically is the fact that there's an entire lobbying apparatus, both from these countries as well as from the weapons industry that has so many senators and Congress people on their payroll that even though it does make it into the news sometimes, and even though there's been a few votes in Congress to try to limit these weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, it hasn't been that successful. And there's always loopholes, just like with the Biden administration itself saying we're not going to sell offensive weapons to Yemen. When this happened, when the Biden administration announced this, it was perceived as a victory for those who want this war in Yemen to end. But a year later, as we've seen, that language doesn't really mean anything because you can just continue to sell, make billions of dollars in weapons sales to the Saudis under the auspices of protecting Saudi sovereignty and giving Saudi Arabia the ability to defend itself, much like the US does with the Israelis. So so far, there's still ongoing efforts to try to push restrictions on sales to Saudi Arabia through Congress, but that's going to take time. And thus far, there's been a lot of pushback against that pushback on the international level. It is true that the UN has continued year after year to describe the war in Yemen as the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the world. But you know, that does, of course, like you mentioned, take away from who's the actual responsible party. And oftentimes you'll see these international institutions because they want to be fair and balanced, whether we're talking about the UN or big human rights organizations like Amnesty International, you'll see them blame both sides for this conflict when it's a completely disproportionate asymmetric conflict where the Saudis have all the best weapons in the world. They have militias, they, you know, the UAE at one point had militias, there's mercenaries, they're paying mercenaries to go fight in Yemen from all kinds of different countries against the Houthis, who sometimes are wearing sandals and lobbing homemade rockets. So it's just absolutely ridiculous to try both sides this conflict, but that's what we see again and again on the international level. And then one last thing I'll mention is the role of Saudi Arabia in either bullying other countries into silence or bullying them into supporting them. And I will give one example of that, you know, I'm doing this interview with you from Lebanon, which a few months ago, the Saudis actually punished Lebanon economically. You know, yeah, Lebanon is experiencing an economic collapse. Saudi Arabia dug up a comment from the Lebanese former Lebanese information minister talking about the war in Yemen and how it's wrong and how the Yemenis have a right to defend themselves. They dug up on that comment. And as a result, for the last several months have continued to economically punish Lebanon by refusing to accept Lebanese imports and refusing to export items to Lebanon. Lebanon is experiencing an economic collapse and Saudi Arabia was a huge market for Lebanon. So this worse than the economic collapse. And this essentially is a message not just to Lebanon, but to other countries in the region, do not criticize our war in Yemen or we will punish you. And that is what Saudi Arabia has continued to do. And as a result, countries around the world who are also allied with Saudi Arabia that are less powerful countries have remained silent on this war. So it's a huge uphill battle to end this.