Yemen's role in global security

Speaker 1: Welcome to The World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defense intelligence community. Now onto the episode.

Sean: Hello and welcome to this edition of Janes World of Intelligence podcast. Regular listeners will have noticed that we've changed it up a bit recently, and I will be again, co- hosting this episode, but this time with Kate Cox, who's the Director of Strategic Programs within the Janes Analysis Division. She will act as the Inquisitor- in- Chief for today's episode, but don't worry, fans of Harry's dulcet tones can be assured that he will return. Welcome Kate and be gentle with us.

Kate Cox: Thank you, Sean. It's good to be here.

Sean: So today's podcast, we'll be returning to a subject that we first discussed just a little over a year ago, and that's Yemen. It's a nation that's scarcely been out the news over the past few months, and is perhaps a surprisingly strategic regional player with its impact, not just on global shipping patterns, but also as an anti- Israeli- Iranian proxy. Now, clearly it's been recently subject to a significant US and UK bombing command. And to help us understand the dynamics around Yemen, we have again, one of Janes expert analysts, James Trigg. James is a senior research analyst within the Middle East and North African team at Janes. Welcome back, James.

James Trigg: Morning, Sean. Thank you for having me back.

Sean: And joining him today, I'm very pleased to welcome for the first time Aparna Iyer, who's also a research analyst within the MENA team. Welcome Aparna.

Aparna Iyer: Hi Sean. Thank you for having me on.

Sean: Cool. Excellent. So without further ado, I'll now hand over to Kate who'll guide us through this regional and indeed global security challenge. Kate.

Kate Cox: Thank you. So as Sean says, this is a conflict that's been in recent headlines for various reasons that we'll dig into today. We'll look at some recent developments including the US answer ala ceasefire deal. We'll look at the threat picture, what's next, and as always hear from our experts on their tradecraft. So to set the scene, I'll come back to you first, Sean. What is the significance of events in Yemen? Why should we care about this part of the world from an international security perspective?

Sean: So that's quite a big question straight off, and I'm sure James and Aparna might have a view as well. It would be easy to say it's all about keeping the Bab- el- Mandeb sea lanes of communication open because it's a vital strategic sea communication area, but of course it's much more than that. And the whole Middle East, we really need to look at in terms of proxies and in terms of strategic competition. So the big strategic competition really is between Iran and everybody else, but Iran and Israel and Iran and Saudi. And I think that when you're looking at Yemen, you need to think about that context in particular. Now many people think that the Houthi or Ansar Allah as it's better known, is just purely a proxy for Iran. And there's a little bit of truth to that, but I think it's more than that as well. They do want to take over form governance of the country. There are issues between them and Saudi Arabia, and I don't think we need to underestimate those as well because as we've seen very recently with the President Trump visit, Saudi Arabia is becoming an ever more strategic partner for the US and indeed the rest of us. And then there's the Israeli element of those. So as I said before, Ansar Allah are seen as a proxy to Iran, but they actually also are very supportive in terms of the Palestinian course and even Hamas. So when you're looking at this area and this country in particular, you need to look at that through several different lenses from strategic to tactical. And then of course al- Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are still players, albeit less so these days. So we need to keep an eye on that from a terrorist perspective.

Kate Cox: So I think we'll return to the proxies and strategic competition angle shortly, but just to pick up on your reference to Ansar Allah or the Houthis, as we also call them, they obviously continue to be a big layer in the conflict and to control large parts of the country. James, could you tell us a little about who they are and what threat they present at the moment?

James Trigg: Absolutely. So Ansar Allah, which is partisans of God in Arabic, also known as the Houthis, are a group which arose from Yemen's northern territories where there's a stronghold of the Zaydi Shia Muslim sect. And they've fought several conflicts with the Yemeni government over the years, particularly on the topic of what they saw as discrimination against their Zaydi Shia communities and the growing presence of Sunni Islamism across Yemen. Now famously in 2014, they signed an alliance of sorts with the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, which saw the Yemeni armed forces cut in half as half sided with the president and half sided with the government. Saleh was subsequently killed in 2017, if I remember correctly. And since then, Ansar Allah have gone on to control, I think the phrase is normally they control 30% of the country and 80% of the population of Yemen. And for a while they were engaged in a conflict with a Saudi Arabian- led military coalition, which launched airstrikes over the borders, as well as supporting troops in Yemen. Both the government aligned Yemeni armed forces, this sort of formal military, but also a range of militias and tribal groups opposed to Ansar Allah. And their impact on the world stage escalated following the outbreak of the Israel- Hamas conflict in October 2023 when Ansar Allah in support of the Palestinian cause and Hamas began launching missile attacks and UAV attacks towards both Israel and shipping passing through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Kate Cox: Thanks, James. And kind of looking ahead, what sort of threat do you think Ansar Allah poses at this point in time?

James Trigg: I think the threat they pose very much depends on what targets we're looking at. Rather abruptly there was a ceasefire announced by President Trump on the 6th of May, which the conditions of which were that US airstrikes against Yemen would cease or I should say US airstrikes against Ansar Allah affiliated targets in Yemen would cease in return for Ansar Allah ceasing its attacks against US shipping. And now that's very specific in that attacks against Israel have continued, and that puts the US ceasefire in a very kind of precarious position because we have to now consider what will the US do if an Israeli ship or a ship heading for Israel is targeted once again in the Red Sea. And likewise, Ansar Allah has had limited success with its attacks against Israel, but some missiles have caused impact. And a UAV attack last year also led to a fatality in Tel Aviv. How is the US going to respond to such incidents in the future? So Ansar Allah's threat level very much depends presently upon its targets.

Kate Cox: Sean, do you have something to add there?

Sean: Yeah. I would just add, I agree with all that, of course. I'll just add to that, again, the context within the nuclear or non- nuclear discussions between the US and Iran are quite important here. So accepting that the Houthi are to an extent a proxy of Iran, there may well be being pressurized right now by the Iranians to tune down what it is they're doing while the talks continue. Now, if and when the talks fail in terms of preventing any UK capability in Iran, then we might see an upturn once again from activity. But I think that personally, I think that the strikes in Israel will continue because that's as much ideological as anything else by the Houthi. But I think in terms of calibration of other things that are going on will depend on how those discussions between the US and Iran progress.

Kate Cox: Thinking about Iran and the question of support then, it's perhaps surprising that Ansar Allah has been able to sustain itself so well given the security and economic challenges facing the group in the country. So coming to you again, Sean, how do you think the group does sustain itself? And you mentioned Iran. Which other actors are supporting them?

Sean: It's a really interesting question actually, bearing in mind that Yemen has been at war for a significant amount of time, and so how are they able to not just sustain themselves, but actually deploy and employ some reasonably sophisticated weaponry. And of course a lot of the answer is that they're being provided by Iran and some potentially other actors. But I think the nature, very nature of how the Houthi operate as well is got something to do with it. So very much decentralized command and control, they are dispersed in terms of their capabilities and it is still fairly small scale. Launchers can be as we go all the way back to the first Gulf War, no, can be hidden quite effectively and can be employed fairly quickly and then hidden away again. So I think that at the tactical level, they've learned very much about survivability. I think it's also worth mentioning on the targeting side that not only is it difficult sometimes to identify moving targets, but despite what you hear in some of the press, there is a lot of checks and balances are done by the targeting community to make sure that there is no, what we would call collateral damage. So you're not looking at civilian objects. Now of course mistakes do happen, but generally there will be a lot of work done to make sure that non- military targets aren't struck and therefore that will limit the actual effect of the strikes themselves. I think at this point though, it's worth saying that, and James might have a view on this, is their ability to field fairly new sorts of weapons is quite remarkable in some ways. On 13th of May, for example, there was a ballistic missile that was launched towards Israel. Now they claimed it was a hypersonic weapon. The IDF are questioning that probably with good cause, but it was still able to travel 2000 kilometers and be relatively accurate. So they call it Palestine 2, but it's believed to have been a derivative of the Iranian Fattah- 1, but with perhaps some extra piece and pieces and it's solid fuel as well, which makes it faster and more accurate. So not only are they able to sustain themselves, but they are almost able to develop things as they're going along.

Kate Cox: Indeed. And James, interested to hear your thoughts here on the question of support in Iran in particular. Do you think they're likely to continue to support Ansar Allah? What factors might be at play there and are there constraints, restrictions in the open source environment that limit the assessments we can make on this topic?

James Trigg: So it's a very contentious topic as to what extent does Iran exerts direct command and control over Ansar Allah, and I think Sean alluded to it quite nicely in his introduction that Ansar Allah is an actor with their own agency, their own agenda and their own mission, not just to control Yemen, but also to involve themselves in the Israeli conflict for their own purposes of shoring up their domestic support by demonstrating their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. And there was an interesting announcement at the beginning of April where I believe a British newspaper reported that Iran had announced it was going to withdraw its military advisors from Yemen in the wake of Operation Rough Rider, the heavy campaign of airstrikes announced by the US in March this year. And the Ansar Allah response to these reports and statements was fairly, I would say, reliable in that they simply announced that there aren't that many Iranian or any Iranian military advisors in Yemen. So it makes no difference if Iran says it's withdrawing them or not. I think principally what we have to bear in mind is even if Ansar Allah has received training previously and very open support, they've now also had almost two years of direct military experience of launching these attacks, targeting Israel, targeting shipping, and they are an actor that's capable of operating with a reasonable degree of independence. So I believe that support for Ansar Allah from Iran will continue to be rhetorical. It will continue to be sort of a case of Iran supporting Ansar Allah in their mission against Israel. But I don't think we'll ever be in a position, certainly not through the open sources at this stage to definitively state that this is the connection, this is the relationship, and I certainly would never describe Ansar Allah as just a proxy for Iran.

Kate Cox: Thank you. So moving away from sources of support and capability to response in some of the recent developments, you were alluding to, James, that US- Ansar Allah ceasefire deal. You told us a little bit about what's behind that deal, but could you give us your views on how credible this is and what it means for international security going forward?

James Trigg: Absolutely. So certainly from my perspective, the Ansar Allah- US ceasefire deal is a very direct bilateral agreement between Ansar Allah and the US to cease the attacks on US shipping, easing those economic pressures from forcing US shipping to re- divert round the Cape in Southern Africa rather than cutting through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, in the same way that Ansar Allah for several years has sought a very specific bilateral peace agreement, ceasefire agreement with Saudi Arabia to withdraw Saudi Arabia from the conflict so that Ansar Allah can continue to focus on combating its domestic rivals without their foreign support. What it means for international security, I think it's going to remain an extremely fragile ceasefire. Again, as I alluded to earlier, I think that continued Ansar Allah attacks against Israel are going to continue to draw the US back into the conflict unless we see a real detachment between Washington and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. And I don't think it's going to reassure shipping companies from other countries a great deal that the US has been able to sign this ceasefire, but their own shipping potentially remains vulnerable. But I'm sure Aparna can also speak to this as well.

Aparna Iyer: So I just wanted to speak about one point that we already discussed earlier with respect to the whole Ansar Allah not just being Iran's proxy. I think it's also notable that when Iran announced that they had nothing to do with the fourth May attack by Ansar Allah on the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, Ansar Allah themselves did not respond to Iran seemingly distancing themselves away from the group either. So they themselves are also very... they are quite content being their own people, being their own independent group, which yeah, I think just adds to what James already mentioned. Yeah.

Kate Cox: Great. Thanks Aparna. And coming back to you again on the response side, so looking to the response from other international actors, we can see continuing strikes from Israel. So you're joining us from the Central Events Team at Janes. Would you be able to tell us a little about how you track this type of activity using our events data and what this tells us about these strikes and their operational effectiveness?

Aparna Iyer: Absolutely. So the Janes Central Events Team, it captures significant events with respect to terrorism and insurgency, government and political and protestant riots. And we collect over 35 data points, which include different types of metadata in addition to just a description of what the event was. For a country like Yemen, it's evidently pretty difficult to get reliable open source information. This is due to myriad reasons, it's the limited remote reporting that we have. It's that Janes has its own standards of what counts as assured and verified intelligence. It's the fact that parties to the conflict are intentionally obscuring their policy positions or even the strategy that they use, that they employ in this particular conflict. So one thing that the Central Events Team does when we do disseminate key information regardless of the shortcomings, is that we add a confidence level to our events. So for instance, we might have an Ansar Allah statement where they have claimed to have targeted an Israeli airport and actually hit the target. And there is nothing in the open source, neither from IDF statements, nor from other Israeli sources, international media that suggests that the missile actually hit its target. So we assign a low confidence level to this, although we still do end up reporting on the event just so that we have an idea of what every single actor in this conflict has to say about it. And yes, it is difficult to not have primary or corroborating sources, which is pretty common for a country like Yemen. So we just make do with the sort of general information we already have about the country, like the knowledge that we already have in place in addition to what looks like the natural progression of events could be.

Kate Cox: Right. Sean, do you have something to add?

Sean: Yeah, just to add to that, I think it's worth noting that even for the intelligence community with all its huge exquisite capabilities, Yemen is a hard target. The lack of access, the lack of people in country if you like makes it particularly difficult. And so we scratch around for different elements or sources if you like, for intelligence. I think Aparna has made a really important point though, is we make it quite often on these podcasts is that deep understanding of the context and of the background and what I call foundational intelligence to then work out, so how credible is? Is this propaganda? Is it being influential and how much of it's true? And I think that's a really important key. But of course, we also use other sources, commercial satellite imagery, which is just getting better and better now even to the extent of, whereas in the old days it was infrequent. Now constellations are getting up there and you've got far more pervasive capabilities, albeit most of these countries know about it and can hide things. But as the more different sensors come on board, things like infrared, things like Synthetic Aperture Radar, it gives us a better picture. But it is worth stating that even for the intelligence community, there are huge gaps in intelligence there.

Kate Cox: So sticking with Sean's favorite topic, tradecraft or the analytical toolkit we apply as analysts, how do we track this conflict and are there key indicators and warnings that we're looking out for? I'll come to you first, James, and then to yourself, Aparna.

James Trigg: So I would say certainly in terms of our tradecraft, Aparna again already alluded to it, the most important thing is triangulation. It's not relying on single sources however dramatic or exciting the news might be. It's always about taking that extra step of this is what one side of the conflict is saying. What are the other side of the conflict saying? And as much as sort of Ansar Allah has made numerous announcements of various attacks against Israel, it has also proven that I believe there was a certain timeframe between March and April where 16 claims were made and 13 claims were made by the IDF of the interception of failure of missiles. So that helps us triangulate that these are not merely propagandistic statements shouted out into the void. There is a consistent pattern of activity here, and that helps us reflect Ansar Allah's capabilities that they can sustain consecutive launches for a period of two weeks or so perhaps. But in terms of indicators and warnings, there was a good example at the beginning of April when reports of consideration for a ground offensive against the Port of Hudaydah by anti- Ansar Allah forces was being floated certainly in American media and in Emirati media. Now this is an indicator perhaps that these reports are being made public. There's a clear suggestion of activity that's about to happen. But again, in terms of corroboration from other sources, I'm looking at other media reports which shows Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sort of backing off from any such reports. And also in terms of, as Sean mentioned, satellite imagery, using the systems that we have access to through open sources, there were no clear build- ups of military forces taking place anywhere that we would expect for advances towards Hudaydah. So again, to go back to what Aparna mentioned earlier, these reports now we lower our confidence, we lower our expectation of future action. We don't disregard them completely because there is always a purpose for these reports being made public to I think inform or lead in certain directions. But yes, certainly in terms of a conflict like Yemen, we're looking for conflict activity, upticks in violence, upticks in numbers of troops being maneuvered, and then couple that with the statements that are being released by various sources.

Kate Cox: Great. Thanks, James. Is there anything else on that you'd add from an events' perspective, Aparna?

Aparna Iyer: Yes. So in addition to what James already mentioned with respect to just troop movements or militants deploying themselves to different fronts, another thing that we notice on the events side is things happening on a lower scale, which is a sort of precursor to what could potentially be happening. For instance, Ansar Allah just announcing an increased recruitment among the Yemeni population that's under its control, or even the statement that Ansar Allah had made. It was on March the 13th, when they specified that they would be resuming their attacks against shipping vessels in the Red Sea, and March 15th is when we saw the US airstrikes commence. So it's these little things also that could be indicators of what comes ahead.

Kate Cox: Indeed. Sean?

Sean: Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to go back to from the super strategic to the tactical is one thing I forgot to mention actually. And that's something that is becoming increasingly important, not just here, but in other conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, and that's battlefield exploitation. When a missile lands somewhere, there are bits of it, and you can very quickly do some reverse engineering if you like, and work out what those pieces of equipment were. So not just on the Israel, but also on some of the shipping strikes, getting an idea about what it is that is being employed and hopefully getting some of the debris is really quite important in working out what capabilities are.

Kate Cox: So stepping away from tradecrafts and moving to the big question, what's next? James, do you see Ansar Allah as presenting a major security threat in the coming months?

James Trigg: In the coming months, let's say in the short term out to six months from now I think that Ansar Allah is very likely going to continue posing a threat to Israel. They've made that part of their campaign a centerpiece, and, yeah, as we've seen even since the signing of the US ceasefire, there have been consistent Ansar Allah claims and launches of attacks towards Israel. So I certainly don't believe that particular front of the conflict on an international scale is going anywhere anytime soon. Remains to be seen if that will also spill back into the Red Sea with the targeting of shipping. But I certainly believe it's likely that any Israeli ships or any Israel bound ships that Ansar Allah can identify are likely to be targeted in the short term in the next six months.

Kate Cox: Great. And a final question from me, one that the listeners of the podcast will be familiar with is, as always we'll wrap up with a key takeaway from everyone from today's discussion. So Sean, I'll come to you first. What is your key takeaway?

Sean: Thanks, Kate. This is quite a hard one actually because there's quite a few here, but I would say that any conflict you can't take in isolation. So this is not just a case of the Ansar Allah versus the Israeli or anything else. It's in the bigger, wider context of the Middle East. So I go back to the issue about all eyes on Iran and the UK discussions right now, and it leads into what we said before.'Cause I agree with James that they're not going anywhere anytime soon. But what they do will depend on both those discussions, but also on the potential resumption of US and UK airstrikes, if they escalate even more because they've got to sustain themselves. It's all about, as it always is about survival of the regime, as well as the ideological element against Israel, which isn't going to go away. So it's looking at the whole piece in a wider context I think is really important.

Kate Cox: Great. Thank you. Aparna, I'll come to you next. What's your key takeaway?

Aparna Iyer: Okay, so my key takeaway, key takeaway is pretty much what Sean said as well, except looking inwards. I think looking at the domestic conflict within Yemen itself as illustrated wonderfully by the Yemen conflict spotlight reports that have been going out since December. That also has a pretty key role to play in possibly predicting what Ansar Allah's next steps could be. So yeah.

Kate Cox: Great. Thank you. And James, how about you? What's your takeaway?

James Trigg: My takeaway simply will be that when we're considering a conflict, we need to consider all sources, whether that's sort of tangible elements like maneuvering of troops that can be observed. Famously, the buildup of Russian troops before the Ukraine conflict broke out was very noticeable. But also the importance of using groups propaganda, statements, rebuttals, it all adds to the picture. And sometimes it's just as important to know that there's a gap in our intelligence because that can tell us something as relevant as having a detailed analysis of the latest missile or drone system being used.

Kate Cox: Yeah, I think my takeaway is very similar to yours, James, focused on the importance of being creative with our tradecraft when we're working with restrictive or challenging open source environments. So looking to different sources. Sean mentioned satellite imagery analysis. Looking at statements made by different actors and factoring in the biases behind those, and looking to, as Aparna was talking about the longer term trends to track patterns of activity as well. So that brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you all for your insights and thank you of course, to our listeners for joining us today. See you next time.

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us this week on The World of Intelligence. Make sure to visit our website, janes. com/ podcast, where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts so you'll never miss an episode.