Yemen's Three Wars

In 2006, a scientific paper confirmed what was long suspected: wars with a larger number of individual players and groups take a proportionally longer amount of time to end. With the addition of each new player, resolving a conflict becomes more difficult as they each add their own conditions for an unacceptable end result. In the modern day, such conflicts are despairingly common. For example, in Libya, Syria and the DRC.

However, in Yemen, the situation is yet more complex. Multiple parties aren't just involved in a single discrete conflict for land or ideological supremacy, but rather are involved in several individual but yet linked conflicts, in some ways resembling a civil war, in others representing a proxy war, and also in some aspects an ethnoreligious conflict. Solving it will require an immense amount of understanding, mutual ability to compromise, and a high level of pressure from international powers.

There is, simply put, no longer a single Yemen. There are multiple Yemens and no single individual or group capable of re-uniting them into a coherent whole.

Writing for Lawfare, Gregory D. Johnsen shows how this war is better to be seen as not one, but three separate conflicts. The first of these is the fight between Islamist groups (such as Al-Qaeda and IS) and the US. The second is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia/UAE, fought on Yemeni soil. The final one is a civil war between the Houthis, and a coalition of other regional groups from the south, who themselves are divided among a constellation of factions. The article posits that while solving all of these conflicts at the same time might be impossible, through tackling them individually real progress might be possible.