On Feb. 4, President Joe Biden announced he was ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen. The Biden administration’s decision to review U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and its subsequent move to revoke the Trump administration’s designation of Houthi forces as a foreign terrorist organization, are welcome steps in reassessing the U.S. role in the Yemen war. Humanitarian groups had broadly criticized the designation as likely to impede relief on the ground to civilians. United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock bluntly called for an immediate reversal of the policy to avert larger-scale famine, noting that 50,000 people were “essentially starving to death in what is essentially a small famine… another 5 million are just one step behind them.”
The UN has labeled Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, as over 80 percent of the population relies on humanitarian assistance to meet basic nutritional requirements. Five rounds of negotiations between the Saudi-backed government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the Houthi forces failed to end the war, which has seen over 112,000 people killed in violence since late 2014. Significant flows of humanitarian assistance helped avert larger-scale famine in early 2019 and limit deaths from the world’s largest recorded cholera epidemic.
