Unconquerable Yemen

Ansarallah won’t back down, staring down the Empire in the Red Sea, Pepe Escobar writes.

SANA’A, Yemen – No wonder the Roman Empire called it Arabia Felix.

It’s 3 pm in Al-Sabeen square in the Haddah neighborhood of Sana’a on Friday, March 28, Al Quds Day, at Ramadan, only two days before Eid al-Fikr, and the crowd of over one million Yemenis stretches to the horizon, gently surrounded by naked hills in the distance and with the grand Al-Saleh mosque framing the foreground.

The foreign pilgrim climbs to a small stage and after all his pilgrimages across the world and the lands of Islam, he knows that in one fleeting minute he must essentially thank the crowd – and this nation – for being so noble, so upright, so fearless, bearers of so much moral clarity and purpose. They should know that the whole Global Majority instinctively gets it – and stands with them.

This is not so much about support for Palestine, which they have been showcasing in this same vast square for 17 months, non-stop – as shown all over global social media – but most of all about the inner strength of Arabia Felix. Free Palestine rhymes – and echoes – in eternity with Freedom of Yemen. They can be heroes not just for one day – as Bowie the Western Chameleon immortalized it: they are heroes for posterity.

One week immersed in deep Yemen is untranslatable in mere words. I was privileged to be part of a small group – from East to West – that actually broke the blockade on Yemen, as our gracious hosts never ceased to remind us. We were primarily guests in a wide-ranging conference on Palestine titled, most appropriately, “You Are Not Alone”.

What strikes us like lightning, right away, is the unbounded Yemeni generosity and their naturally aristocratic-cum-debonair allure. They are the epitome of chic not only sartorially but spiritually. Nearly every night last week I was trying to convey this magic across several podcasts, such as this one and this one. As much as the conversations with towering academics, diplomats and top members of the High Political Council, the real delight in Yemen is the famous – Xi Jinping-style – “people to people’s exchanges”, particularly at night time in the mesmerizing souks of Saada in the northwest and the Old City in Sana’a.

This is the true soul of Arabia, its secrets perfuming the air like the incense a Purifier dressed in white spreads around the al-Kabir mosque in the Old City, blind men crouching at the entrance chewing qat and absorbed in meditation. This magic is what Allah himself characterizes in the Holy Book in several verses and chapters – a generosity only bestowed to Yemenis.

Fighting a “coalition” of willing vassals

Amidst a cornucopia of meetings and cups of the best coffee on the planet, a convoy of decoy SUVs slicing the raw landscape from Sana’a to Saada, non-stop pledges of solidary with Palestine and instances of cowardly CENTCOM bombing – from several civilian, residential buildings to an in-progress cancer hospital in Saada – soon it becomes clear that Yemen is fighting yet another lethal chapter, now against the Trump 2.0-led CENTCOM, of what is a 10-year war, initiated in March 26, 2015.

That was the first war in History, as defined by the masterful Undeterred: Yemen In The Face of Decisive Storm, by Prof. Dr. Abdulaziz Saleh bin Habtoor – which I had the honor to meet in Sana’a – “in which all the rich Arab countries” (with the exception of Oman) stood “under the cloak of the most powerful imperialist country in an unsacred coalition against the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula”.

A trademark “coalition” of willing vassals, led by Saudi Arabia and for a stretch also the UAE, with the U.S. under the Obama-Biden racket “leading from behind” and providing the weapons alongside the British, not only bombed Yemen indiscriminately but also imposed a devastating blockade of air, land and sea, preventing the arrival of medicine, fuel and food, and generating at least 2.4 million displaced people and a cholera epidemic.

It’s hardly an accident that the upstart, tawdry, bling bling Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia hate Yemen with a vengeance. War on Yemen, virtually for decades, as Prof. bin Habtoor noted in our meeting, has been the Enterprise Weapon of Choice for a family scam set up by the British Empire in the 1920s to extract the wealth of Arabia.

Obviously no one across the – now fractured – collective West remembers that Yemen later became “Crown Prince” MbS’s war. The existence of his regime – now a darling of Trump 2.0 – was leveraged from the start on winning this war, until MbS was forced to realize he could never make it: only in 2017 the war was costing him more than $300 billion. He had to accept an armistice.

No “victory”: not against these unconquerable heroes.

The memory-impaired, fractured collective West also has no recollection that Britannia Rules the Waves was forced to surrender its self-imagined global dominatrix role to the Americans after it could not subdue extremely fierce resistance in – where else – South Yemen in the 1960s.

That opened the way to Saudi-led dementia – even as the pattern remained the same: Yemenis simply won’t surrender their homeland’s fabulous natural wealth to subsidize the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder’s chronic need for liquidity, collateral for new cash manipulations, and most of all the commodities that lie under Yemen’s rich soil.

And that brings us to the current, relentless CENTCOM bombing of civilian (italics mine) buildings and infrastructure from Sana’a to Saada and the port of Hodeidah – which we could not visit because it’s being bombed virtually every day. As much as we detailed to our Yemeni interlocutors how worried we are with the Empire unleashing its fury, they invariably answered with a smile: We Will Win. That may come from Yahya Saree, the military spokesman of the Yemeni armed forces – who against all security odds visited us in our hotel – or from a drop dead cool camel biker in the souk in Saada.

Extra mischief against Yemen comes from the UAE, a privileged partner of Trump 2.0 in Persian Gulf business, which has primacy over Yemen’s oil assets and access to much of Yemen’s supremely strategic southern coastline, investing heavily in colonizing the island of Socotra. And then there are the “unofficial” proxies, on and off, of Saudis and Emiratis: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS/Daesh – weapons of choice for selected factions of the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder.

Meanwhile, Ansarallah won’t back down, staring down the Empire in the Red Sea: “When American soldiers are killed in the Red Sea, what will they say to their people and families? Will they claim they were killed for the liberation of their country, or will they say they were killed to protect the Zionist terrorists?”

Unconquerable.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/04/01/unconquerable-yemen/