WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization, said four American officials familiar with the decision on Sunday, using one of their last means of force against the Saudi Arabian enemy at the risk of exacerbating a famine in one of the poorest nations in the world.
It is not clear how the terrorist designation will inhibit the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for almost six years, but, some analysts say, do not pose a direct threat to the United States.
Pompeo will announce the appointment in his last full week as Secretary of State, and more than a month after meeting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who began a military intervention with Arab allies against the Houthis in 2015. This campaign killed civilians, destroyed infrastructure and worsened a humanitarian crisis that left millions of Yemenis hungry.
State Department spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday night, and American officials who confirmed the appointment spoke on condition of anonymity because it had not yet been announced. The impending announcement was reported on Sunday evening by Reuters.
The inclusion of the Houthis in the department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations means that combatants within the relatively decentralized movement will be deprived of financial support and other material resources that are routed through American banks or other American institutions.
But the Houthis’ main patron is Iran, which continues to send support despite being hampered by severe US economic sanctions, making the designation’s effect on the rebels more symbolic than striking.
For the rest of Yemen, however, the designation is certain to exacerbate the devastation.
Experts said it would slow humanitarian efforts to donate food and medicine to areas controlled by Houthi in northern and western Yemen, where most of the country’s 30 million people live, for fear that aid will be seized by the rebels and used. for profit that could be traced back to aid organizations. The rebels also control the capital, Sana, and parts of the strategic port city of Hudaydah, where much of the world’s humanitarian aid is offloaded.
The United Nations estimates that about 80% of Yemenis depend on food assistance, and almost half of all children suffer stunted growth because of malnutrition. On November 20, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that Yemen was “now in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen in decades”.
“I urge all those with influence to act urgently on these issues to avoid catastrophe, and I also urge everyone to refrain from taking any action that could make the already dire situation even worse,” said Guterres at the time. “Otherwise, we risk a tragedy not only in the immediate loss of life, but with consequences that will reverberate indefinitely in the future.”
Some Houthi leaders had already been chosen for American terrorism-related sanctions. The broadest designation against the entire movement has been considered by the Trump administration for years.
The fact that Pompeo is now reporting, in the last days of the government, is a sign of his determination to maintain his pressure campaign against Iran as long as possible.
The United States accuses the Houthi rebels of being Iran’s surrogate fighters, seeking to destabilize neighboring Saudi Arabia by launching missiles over its border and hitting its oil fields. But a major attack on two Saudi Aramco state oil facilities in September 2019, which the Houthis said they carried out, looked much more sophisticated than previous rebels’ attacks.
This suggested that Iran was directly involved, as the Trump administration said, despite Tehran’s denials.
“The Trump administration could have leveraged its ties to Saudi Arabia in the past four years to move towards a resolution on the conflict,” said Ariane Tabatabai, a Middle East fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a public policy think tank, in a recent interview in anticipation of the assignment. “Instead, the government chose to give Saudi leaders blank checks.”
She predicted that the terrorist designation was part of a strategy to force President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s government to maintain a hard line on Iran – or risk the political consequences of having to “explain to domestic critics and regional partners why this reversing the sanctions. “
The Trump administration has been steadfastly supporting Saudi Arabia and its allies in the war in Yemen, providing intelligence and billions of dollars of weapons against congressional objections, despite indiscriminate bombings that killed civilians and other military atrocities that can result in war crimes.
In October, the rebels released two American hostages and the remains of a third in a prisoner exchange that also allowed some 240 Houthis to return from Oman to Yemen. The freed Houthis included fighters captured by the Saudi-led coalition and officers who had gone to Oman for international peace talks and were not allowed to return home.
In addition to the impending famine, the terrorist designation can also seal the fate of a huge rusty tanker anchored off the west coast of Yemen.
Compared to a floating bomb, partly because of the accumulation of combustible gas it may be carrying in its tanks, the decomposing ship, the FSO Safer, is not far from the port of Hudaydah. If it explodes or simply disintegrates, it could dump more than 1.1 million barrels of oil into the Red Sea, destroying its ecosystem in a spill four times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.
About half a dozen Houthis are on board the vessel, along with a small crew of state-backed engineers from the state-owned company that owns the title, said Ian M. Ralby, the executive head of IR Consilium, a maritime security consultancy. The terrorist designation may prevent UN negotiators from working with the Houthis as soon as possible to repair the ship or neutralize the danger it poses.
“If we don’t want to make Yemen lose an entire generation,” said Ralby, “we need to back down on that assignment.”
Edward Wong contributed reports.