In addition to desperate days in the Ukrainian trenches while drones and missiles whistle overhead toward Odesa and Kyiv, this holiday season is also experiencing the massive attempt by Israel's Defense Force against the remaining Hamas fighters, too many still hiding in tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip. To add to these very real zones of combat, Iranian-allied Houthi partisans in the hills overlooking the Red Sea are trying to open up another anti-Israeli front by attacking ships carrying containers and oil through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait between Arabia and Africa. And the battling armies in Sudan are at it again, too, having agreed recently to a truce that does not hold.
The Houthi Attacks
In 2015, Houthi rebels who had for decades nestled in the farthest southwest corner of Saudi Arabia crossed the border into Yemen, then governed by a corrupt ruling elite led by Field Marshal Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. In the years since, despite Saudi Arabian and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) assistance, with some material help during the Trump years, the retreating Hadi forces lost ground repeatedly in much of northern and western Yemen to the Houthi.
The Houthi received arms and cash from Iran, and remain a staunch ally of Iran now that their hold on the heart of the old Yemen has largely been secured. (South Yemen, around the old British port of Aden, is in non-Houthi hands, and the wild eastern Hadhramaut desert region of Yemen stretching toward Oman is also not Houthi-controlled.)
Only this year has the Houthi battle for primacy in northern Yemen largely been won. Skirmishes still continue, but the UAE backed away from the war in 2022 and the Saudis have largely conceded defeat as well. So the fact that the Houthi regime finally reigns supreme in the old center of Yemen has emboldened them, on behalf of Iran, to show solidarity with Hamas and to demonstrate their drone capabilities by attacking Eilat, 1,144 miles away on Israel's Gulf of Aqaba. Now they are also using missiles and drones to target ships passing into the Red Sea through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait off the Yemeni coast. (The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is eighteen miles wide, with two lanes, one northbound and one southbound, for shipping.) The Houthi claim that they are attacking vessels bound for Israel or owned and connected somehow to Israelis. But in most cases those ties have been misconstrued; nearly all of the ships targeted so far have nothing to do with Israel.
Oil tankers are being re-routed around South Africa, an immensely longer route to Europe. So are container ships, at least two of which recently had individual containers on board destroyed by missile fire. About ten ships have been attacked so far and hundreds routed around the Cape of Good Hope.
American, British, and French naval vessels in the region have intercepted Houthi-fired drones and missiles, and Israel has done the same for similar attacks near Eilat. Now, the U. S. Navy, with three warships in the region, has organized Operation Prosperity Guardian along with Britain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the Seychelles, and Spain. Together, their ships will patrol or otherwise cooperate to provide intelligence support for what will become a concerted multinational initiative to oppose the Houthi attacks. A Combined Task Force 53 already exists to improve maritime security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden environs (and to cope with renewed piracy from Somalia).
The U. S. presumably is able to pinpoint the Houthi launching sites and, if it wished, destroy them. At a press conference this week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III refused to say why U.S. firepower has not been used to silence the Houthi actions. Presumably, neither he nor President Biden want to open up a third front in Yemen, and probably want to avoid a direct confrontation with Iran through its proxies. But if Operation Prosperity otherwise is insufficient, U.S. carrier-based aircraft could make quick work of the Houthi menace to shipping.
Sudan
A meeting hosted by Djibouti last week arranged a truce between the two armed legions that are making mincemeat of Sudan's corpus. But the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an irregular militia led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemeti), this week attacked a big city (Wad Madani) south of the capital, Khartoum, where many thousands of displaced Sudanese from Khartoum, Omdurman, and other cities on the Nile River had fled to escape shelling and bombing by the RSF and the regular Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Hemeti's now arch-rival General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Both ambitious men had run Sudan in tandem since a coup in 2021, then separating and attacking each other's contingents from April of this year.
Nearly 7 million Sudanese are displaced from their homes, or have fled into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, or across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, because of the ceaseless shelling and bombardments that have destroyed what once was one of Africa's more prosperous and stable states. Perhaps 3 million of the homeless have fled Darfur, where in recent months the mostly Arab RSF has persecuted and killed Africans and propelled many to safety in Chad. (Hamas even has investments in Sudan, now in jeopardy.) Ethnic cleansing is underway in Darfur, just as it was in 2003-2006. But the mayhem south of Khartoum pits Arab against Arab, with hapless civilians fleeing a internecine struggle that involves them only as victims.
Hemeti and Burhan both want supreme power. They want to accumulate both oil transmission pipeline revenues and cash from gold.
The RSF is currently ascendant. The SAF seems unable to gain traction despite what could have been and may still be an alliance with the army of Egypt. The RSF's advantage is support (weapons and cash) from both from the UAE and Russia's Wagner Group, with gold as the likely attraction. Egypt's air power could easily help Burhan turn the tide, but the troubles in Gaza and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's focus on his reelection (accomplished easily this week by 90 percent of the vote) may thus far have inhibited Egyptian action backing Burhan.
Guyana
Let's end this edition of the Newsletter with good news. A war between little Guyana (800,000 people) and massively corrupted but comparatively huge (29 million people) Venezuela seems to have been avoided, thanks to the timely intervention of tiny island states of the Caribbean -- St Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Their leaders persuaded dictator Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela to stop, or at least postpone, his threat to invade neighboring Guyana, where massive petroleum deposits are being exploited by ExxonMobil.
In 1899, Venezuela lost its claim to the Essequibo region (now more than two-thirds of the land area of Guyana, a onetime British colony). Maduro tried reviving that claim in the aftermath of the discovery of Essequibo's offshore oil riches, in part because there is a Venezuelan election in February and inventing a jingoistic grievance against Guyana has aroused some irredentist nationalist feelings among his potential voters.
The meeting on St. Vincent fortunately has at least postponed any Venezuelan attacks on Guyana, even though the threat may always have been more theater than actual. The Guyanese and Venezuelan leaders will meet again in Brazil in three months' time. For now, that is one more endangered part of the world we need not worry about in these last weeks before the new year. Let us be thankful, amid so much mayhem, for at least one respite from another potential zone of combat. The world has too many as it is.
We can at least hope and pray that wars in the world wind down in 2024, that the deserving and the just win, and that more lives are spared next year than in these last deadly weeks of 2023.
Subscribers: I will be traveling until the new year. You'll hear from me again early in January. Peace and holiday joy to all.
Thank you for your insights this year Robert. I wish safe travels upon you.