The United Nations announced Tuesday a temporary pause in humanitarian work in the Saada region of Yemen after Houthi insurgents kidnapped eight more staffers, bringing the total number in detention to at least 24.
One employee of the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) has reportedly died in Houthi captivity.
The Iran-backed Houthi insurgency, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization that refers to itself as Ansar Allah (“Army of Allah”), launched a brutal civil war in Yemen in 2014. The Houthis seized large portions of Yemen, including the capital city of Sanaa, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
President Joe Biden bizarrely decided to revoke the Houthis’ terrorist designation as one of his first acts in office, ostensibly because designating the Houthis as terrorists would make them angry and impede humanitarian efforts to reach millions of sick and starving Yemenis.
Biden’s decision also appears to have been part of his doomed effort to reach out to Iran and restart his old superior Barack Obama’s badly flawed 2015 nuclear deal, which President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018 after years of Iranian malfeasance.
The Houthis merrily continued engaging in terrorist activity and human-rights atrocities after Biden’s gift of lifting their terrorist designation. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and launched the Gaza war, the Houthis began attacking international shipping in the Red Sea with drones and missiles, inflicting billions of dollars of economic damage upon the civilized world.
Biden made a weak effort to protect shipping, but the Houthis were able to effectively shut down the Red Sea and Suez Canal with relentless terrorist attacks.
Eventually even the fading Biden administration realized it had made a terrible mistake, reinstating a very limited terrorist designation for Ansar Allah during Biden’s last days in office. President Donald Trump restored the full Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation for the Houthis in January.
Yemen remains a humanitarian basket case, so seven U.N. agencies continue shipping food and medicine to the long-suffering population, including the WFP, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), and the children’s agency UNICEF. The U.N. estimates that at least 18 million people in Yemen — roughly 80 percent of the population — are in severe need of assistance, .
The Houthis have arrested dozens of U.N. aid workers, accusing them of collaborating with the United States and Israel. This prompted the U.N. to ban travel into Houthi-controlled areas last month, but evidently some personnel remained in the ancient northeastern mountain city of Saada, to be abducted by Houthi forces.
On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres ordered a temporary pause in operations for northern Yemen, citing the “hostile conditions” created by Houthi terrorism.
U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq accused the Houthis of violating an agreement they struck in December to stop arresting humanitarian personnel on dubious espionage charges. Haq said the Houthis have also reneged on promises to release the U.N. workers they have illegally detained.
“This extraordinary and temporary measure seeks to balance the imperative to stay and deliver with the need to have the safety and security of the U.N. personnel and its partners guaranteed,” he said.
“This is not a normal procedure or something we do frequently,” he added.
The WFP said on Tuesday that one of its employees has died in Houthi captivity.
“WFP is grief-stricken and outraged about the death of a staff member while in detention in northern Yemen,” the agency said.
The slain staffer was reportedly a Yemeni national who was “arbitrarily detained” by the insurgents on January 23. He was not named, but WFP said he began working for the U.N. in 2017 and had a wife and two children.
Read the full article here