Leaked Saudi Cables Reveal the Shadowy Committee That Oversees the Kingdom’s Policy on Yemen

Leaked Saudi Cables Reveal the Shadowy Committee That Oversees the Kingdom’s Policy on Yemen Drop Site is a reader-funded, independent news outlet. Without your support, we can’t operate. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation today (givebutter.com › dsn substack).Subscribe now (dropsitenews.com › subscribe?) (substackcdn.com)Then-Saudi Defense Minister Salman bin Abdul Aziz looks on during the King Faisal International prize awards ceremony held in Riyadh on March 6, 2012. Photo by Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images.Story by Shuaib Almosawa and Jeb BooneSANA’A, Yemen—In January 2012, Saudi Arabia’s then-defense minister, Salman bin Abdulaziz, issued a directive advising a shadowy Saudi government committee to widen Yemen’s northern war. In broad terms, the plan entailed engineering a rift between northern Yemen’s Shia majority and Salafi Sunnis when one previously had not existed.The order came at a time when Yemen’s internal power structures were in disarray following a 2011 popular uprising against the longtime rule of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saudi Arabia, which shares a 812-mile border with Yemen, had long managed delicate relations with its southern neighbor and now looked with growing concern at the chaos unfolding within the country. By 2012, Yemen’s army had splintered into rival factions both camped inside the capital city, Sana’a. Saleh had stepped down after 33 years of power and his former vice president Abd Rabo Mansur Hadi stood prepared to take the reins through a single candidate election—hardly the legitimate figure the fractured political landscape demanded.Worst of all for Saudi Arabia, its old rival Ansarallah—which was based in Yemen’s northern highlands with a stronghold in the city of Saada—stood poised to take advantage of the chaos.Known as the Houthis, Ansarallah grew out of a revival movement among Yemen’s Zaydis, followers of a branch of Shia Islam that ruled the northern highlands for a thousand years until 1962. Zaydism sits closer in doctrine to the four orthodox Sunni legal schools than to the Twelver Shiism of Iran, and in the early 2000s most Zaydis hadn’t yet joined the Houthi cause.Salman’s plan was essentially twofold: to arm the Yemeni tribes fighting the Houthi movement, most of them ultra-conservative adherents of the Salafi school of Islamic jurisprudence and educated in the kingdom’s own Wahhabi current; and to drive a wedge between Ansarallah and the wider Zaydi community.A January 2012 cable (archive.org) directed to a secretive special government committee handling Saudi Arabia’s relationship to Yemen stamped “Extremely Secret, Very Urgent” with Salman’s signature at the bottom outlines the plan: “The Special Committee of the Council of Ministers should discuss and study supporting Yemeni tribes hostile to the Houthis if they fail to commit to reconciliation with Ahl al-Sunnah [Salafists] in Saada, enabling multiple fronts against them, fostering discord between Houthis and Zaydi followers, while ensuring the fighting does not appear as a Sunni-Shia sectarian war in Yemen or that the Kingdom is behind it.”Salman did not want it to appear sectarian because a war between Ansarallah and Saudi Arabia framed as a purely sectarian conflict, Sunni vs. Shia, would drive northern Yemen’s majority Zaydi Shia population toward support for Ansarallah out of a sense of religious duty or alignment with the cause.The kingdom’s proxy fighting force in northern Yemen at the time, the Salafist Sunni tribes, were just one part of their plan. In order to isolate Ansarallah from Yemen’s wider Zaydi Shia community, figh