Saudi Arabia cannot find a way out of Yemen

DURING THEUN Korean war an American general quipped that his beleaguered troops were not retreating, just “advancing in a different direction”. So too it was for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, which in mid-November withdrew its forces from Hodeida, the main port on the country’s Red Sea coast. The Houthis, a group of Shia rebels who have been fighting the coalition since 2015, swept in to seize it.The pull-out was a surprise to almost everyone, even the observers deployed to monitor a ceasefire in the area since 2018. “[This] represents a major shift of the front lines”, the observer mission noted, a remarkable exercise in understatement.