The targeting of Saudi airports and civilian facilities, with dead and wounded among travelers as pilgrims and civilians passed through the terminals, does not represent merely a new round in the escalation led by the terrorist Houthi militia. It is another chapter in the madness of a renegade group that hijacked Yemen, tormented Yemenis and subjected them to the worst of suffering, and then carried its armed project beyond the borders, until civilian airports, travelers, and economic facilities became part of its target bank.
The recent attacks on the Kingdom's airports confirm that exposing civilians to danger is not a side effect or a reckless error in the militia's conduct, but a turn toward a suicidal strategy in an attempt to apply pressure and impose a political and security cost that can be negotiated over.
Describing this conduct as madness alone may obscure an understanding of its political motives. The attack on Saudi airports is an event with consequences, and it came in a different and complicated regional context, in which the American-Iranian escalation has halted while Tehran treats the de-escalation as a victory to be exploited against the region's states.
This is also what it is trying to market to the Houthi militia, the "arm" being thrust into the furnace of destruction after Hezbollah was sidelined, and amid the tug-of-war within Iraq's militias. It is from this angle, that of political suicide, that we must understand the Houthis' conduct.
Saudi Arabia's history with Yemen is as clear as the sun at midday: it has always placed Yemenis' interest first, in whatever serves them and serves their country.
But this current Houthi persistence attempts to ignore a fundamental fact, which is that the Kingdom is a pivotal and central state, capable of defending its territory, its citizens, and its facilities, having accumulated over long years an expertise in confronting missiles, drones, and cross-border threats.
The reality is that the Houthi militia's recklessness in Yemen cannot be reduced to a question concerning the Kingdom's security. That is a mistaken view, into which, unfortunately, those who approach the Yemeni case without understanding its context fall- particularly some researchers, institutions, and even political currents within the international community.
The matter today goes beyond the threat to the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, and beyond the safety of aviation and navigation through the world's most important and most sensitive arteries of trade and energy, whose disruption is paid for not by Riyadh alone but by the world's markets and economies, and for a long time.
Even so, the real predicament is the militia's crimes against Yemen and Yemenis; that is something intolerable. It is the Houthi militia that impoverished the Yemeni people and displaced them. A great responsibility therefore falls on the legitimate authorities and on fair-minded media seeking the truth, to redefine the Yemeni tragedy before the international community.
Since the beginning of the crisis ten years ago, international approaches have circulated that treat the Houthi militia as a political party for which a formula must be found to integrate it into a political settlement. But this simplistic description of a context as complex as Yemen's conceals the heart of the Yemeni predicament: that the Houthis did not reach their position through normal political competition, but by seizing the state and its institutions by force of arms, and then turning this into a bitter reality lived by some 24.7 million Yemenis out of 34.9 million- roughly 71 percent of Yemen's population- against some 10.2 million living in the areas under the legitimate Yemeni government's control.
Raising the banner of the need to reach a sustainable peace in Yemen is important, and it is also a Saudi objective, since Yemenis have no alternative to a stable state and a peace with room for all components. But the predicament is that raising the banner of peace turns into legitimizing the militia's crimes against Yemenis and accepting it as a fait accompli. Yemenis are the Houthis' greatest victims and the longest-suffering. This is the fact the world must grasp.
Since the seizure of Sanaa roughly a decade ago, Yemenis have experienced every kind of torment and suffering: detention, enforced disappearance, torture, prisons, the recruitment of children, the laying of mines, the blowing up of homes, the confiscation of property and companies, the imposition of levies and extortion, the harassment of journalists, activists, political opponents, and religious minorities, alongside the diversion of the state's resources and its economy to serve the war.
Nor did the matter stop at the militia's control over people's livelihoods and their lives. It extended to education, to changing curricula, to the summer centers and an ideological mobilization of a politicized doctrinal character, so that control over the new generations becomes part of the project of hijacking Yemen and stripping away its identity.
Today's crisis cannot be reduced to a search for the best means of reintegrating the militia, nor to acquiescence in a fait accompli created by force of arms. It lies in redefining the Yemeni tragedy as it actually is, without falsification: Yemen has been hijacked, Yemenis are paying a heavy price for the international community's failure to restore its legitimacy, and the militia is trying to turn this stricken country, which is approaching a humanitarian catastrophe without parallel, into a platform of intimidation for imposing an outside will through repression at home and through threatening neighboring states and the world's trade.
The crisis did not begin with the targeting of airports, or even with the disruption of Bab al-Mandab. It was born the day the Yemeni state fell into the hands of the armed militia, and it will not end until Yemen returns to Yemenis as a state not held hostage to the logic of mines and the voice of the rifle.
