Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, carry the coffin of a fellow Houthi who was killed during fighting against Saudi-backed Yemeni forces in Marib province. Photo: AP

Washington: The war in Yemen has become an invisible and dirty conflict. The US and Britain are propping up a stalled Saudi effort to assert itself as a regional power – but with Riyadh armed to the gills by the West, it demonstrates little restraint in its targeting.

As the war enters its second year, a shaky fourth truce is holding and investigations by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have produced evidence that Washington and London could be complicit in war crimes – as the provider of weapons, training and intelligence for the Saudi forces.

Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, pray at portrait adorned graves of Houthi fighters in Sanaa last week. Photo: AP

President Barack Obama heads to Riyadh this week for talks with the Saudi royals, and veteran White House and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel argues that peace in Yemen needs to be a high priority – "the war has already cost the kingdom billions. It has had a devastating humanitarian impact in Yemen and the border regions of Saudi Arabia".

Advertisement

Much of the humanitarian damage has been wrought with US and British supplied weapons. But Yemen might be just the start of a slippery slope for the West because, as Riedel observes, the Saudis want more, not less US "policing" in a region in which the biggest beneficiary of the Yemen war has been al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP].

He writes: "AQAP now controls some 600km of the southern coastline – from just outside Aden to Mukalla where, at the start of the war, it looted $US100 million ($130 million) from its banks."

Boys play in floodwaters after heavy rain in Sanaa last week. Photo: AP

Noting that until recently the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen had not taken the attack to AQAP, Riedel says: "They are now earning at least $US2 million and perhaps as much as $US5 million a day in smuggling oil. The group is stronger today than ever before."

Peace talks are scheduled in Kuwait on Monday [April 18], and in the event of failure, Riedel sees a grim aftermath, because Riyadh is threatening a new offensive to wrest control of the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, from Houthi rebels, even as the UN estimates that 21 million Yemenis need immediate relief, one-third of whom suffer severe food insecurity.

Now at the Brookings Institution, Riedel writes: "A battle for the capital will compound the tragedy enormously."

A boy chants slogans through a gap in a national flag raised by Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, during a protest against Saudi-led airstrikes in Sanaa on Friday. Photo: AP

In January, a UN investigative panel reported "widespread and systematic" Saudi attacks, arguing in a 51-page report: "The [Saudi-led] coalition had conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law, including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana'a, the port in Hudaydah; and domestic transit routes."

Claiming to have investigated 119 coalition sorties that related to violations of international humanitarian law, the report acknowledged that Houthi rebels positioned in residential areas also were violating the law, but "this does not suspend the coalition's obligation to respect international humanitarian law".

Saudi Arabia is now the world's third biggest buyer of weapons and the US is a crucial supplier – of aircraft and munitions; intelligence from reconnaissance drones and airborne fuel tankers for inflight refuelling is coordinated by a 45-strong American team of military planners stationed in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

A boy looks out from the window of his house in the Old City in Sanaa, Yemen, earlier this month. Photo: AP

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division, writes that Saudi Arabia contracted for at least $US20 billion in weapons from the US in 2015. And the tiny UAE, Riyadh's main partner in the Yemen war, was not far behind – as the world's fourth biggest arms buyer, it had acquired $US1.07 billion in arms from the US and $US65 million from Britain in 2015.

Whitson is scathing in apportioning some of the blame for the Yemeni crisis: "One week before the Brussels terrorist attacks, a Saudi-led coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, Yemen. Although more people died in Mastaba than in Brussels – 106 versus 34 – the media and the international community in general ignored that earlier atrocity, as they have ignored most of the 150 indiscriminate aerial attacks reported by the UN and HRW in the last year."

HRW investigators report finding remnants at Mastaba of a GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, consisting of a US-supplied MK-84 2000-pound bomb fitted with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also US-supplied.

British Prime Minister David Cameron in London in March. Photo: Getty Images

HRW's emergencies researcher Priyanka Motaparthy said of the two aerial strikes on a crowded market in Mastaba on March 15: "One of the deadliest strikes against civilians in Yemen's year-long war involved US-supplied weapons, illustrating tragically why countries should stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

In London, the government led by David Cameron is facing demands that it must challenge the Saudis on the extent to which the Saudis are in breach of international humanitarian law in their indiscriminate targeting in Yemen.

London has licensed the sale of weapons valued at close to $US10 billion to Riyadh, about one-third of it since the Yemen war began in March 2015.

Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London, told The Guardian, that in not inquiring into the Saudi use of the weapons, Britain was in breach of international, European and British law. According to Sands, as many as 80 per cent of Saudi airstrikes in Yemen were not planned, but were ad-hoc – so-called "dynamic" strikes.

Just weeks before the start of the Yemeni conflict, London and Washington ordered that flags be flown at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Canberra did the same.

The king, of course paid fabulous amounts for American and British weapons; no such respect for the thousands of civilian Yemenis who have died in the war.