Senior State Department officials are pressuring Iranian leaders to drop their support for militants in the Yemeni civil war as the new Biden administration searches for ways to combat Tehran.
“The Iranians have played a very negative role in Yemen hitherto,” State Department special envoy Timothy Lenderking, the lead U.S. diplomat for the Yemen crisis, told reporters on Tuesday. “There’s also an opportunity I think for Iran to … put its best foot forward in terms of supporting the kind of international response that we’re trying to engineer here to end this conflict.”
Fighting between the Iranian-backed Houthis and a Saudi Arabian-led coalition degenerated into a humanitarian crisis, with millions of people teetering on the brink of mass starvation due to the tactics of the belligerents. President Biden’s team has decided to cut support for offensive Saudi Arabian military operations due to mounting civilian casualties while also attempting to start peace talks.
Those efforts have sputtered, with Houthi fighters launching a new offensive.
“The Houthis’ assault on Marib is the action of a group not committed to peace or to ending the war afflicting the people of Yemen,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday. “If the Houthis are serious about a negotiated political solution, they must cease all military advances and refrain from other destabilizing and potentially lethal actions, including cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia.”
The Houthis are attacking the city of Marib, the last major city held by the government overthrown by the militants in 2015.
“An assault on the city would put two million civilians at risk, with hundreds of thousands potentially forced to flee — with unimaginable humanitarian consequences,” United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock wrote Monday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken rescinded Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s blacklisting of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, not due to any dispute about the militant group’s behavior but because the finding would curtail most humanitarian aid to regions it controls.
“If the Houthis are under the false impression that this administration intends to let its leadership off the hook, they are sorely mistaken,” Price said.
Lenderking, the special envoy, said that Iran has been “equipping the Houthis to conduct attacks against civilian targets in [Saudi Arabia] and elsewhere in the Gulf,” which gives the Saudis a defensive justification for continued conflict with the Iranian-backed group.
“We’re not going to allow Saudi Arabia to be target practice,” Lenderking said, calling for a split between Tehran and the militants. “The main thing is to stop the support for lethal activities by the Houthis because that is particularly troubling.”
