Military parades of the Houthi and Islah militia in the north

English - Wednesday 28 September 2022 الساعة 04:51 pm
Taiz, NewsYemen, special:

In less than a week, three cities in the north witnessed military parades by the Muslim Brotherhood and Houthi groups that seemed like a race between the two parties under different titles, but under one goal, which is to highlight their possession of sufficient strength for confrontation in the event the truce ends and the battle resumes.

But the fact that unites the two sides of the parade (the Houthis and the Brotherhood) says that the armistice represented a lifeline for them from military failure on the field, which amounts to defeat and the failure of either of them to resolve their battle in the north, to add to the record of their previous defeats during the seven years of the war.

Al-Houthi, who launched the wave of military parades during the armistice period, ended it with a military parade in the Seventy Square in Sana’a last Wednesday on the occasion of the 8th anniversary of his overthrow of the capital and the state in September 2014, trying through their media and followers on social media to exaggerate the matter and paint an exaggerated picture of the power of weapon they own.

Al-Houthi’s attempts are exposed by his successive military defeats since the first months of the war in 2015 and the size of the cities and governorates from which he expelled his militia, despite what they had of equipment and weapons compared to what he has today, starting from the cities of the south, Taiz and Marib, all the way to the outskirts of Hodeidah in 2018, not ending with his quick defeat on  The hand of the labor brigades in the districts of Bayhan, Shabwa, early this year.

Perhaps the most severe defeat for the Houthi group has been its repeated failure to overthrow Marib since 2014 due to the strength of the resistance of its tribes, to repeat the matter in 2021 after it was tempted by the fall of the legitimate fronts in Nihm, Al-Jawf and Al-Bayda.  However, their dream was shattered again on the walls of the city of Ma'rib due to the steadfastness of its people, and as a result of its defeat in Shabwa, after it incurred more than 30,000 deaths in battles on the Marib fronts during a whole year.  

This represented its most important reasons for agreeing to the truce to catch its breath and put its papers in order.

The Houthi group realizes that its military strength will not be better than it was at the beginning of the war and that its ability to continue with the military option is no longer easy, and it is no longer easy to recruit more fighters. However, it sees in military parades a necessity to continue collecting them from citizens after they stopped the war is because of the armistice, and there is no longer any justification for looting Yemenis' money under the name of "the war effort."

The scene with Al-Houthi is not significantly different from what it is with the Brotherhood, which controls the situation in the cities of Marib and Taiz, which witnessed a military parade on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the September 26 revolution, with a symbolic parade in Taiz, in contrast to the enormity of what Marib witnessed of a military parade that included a parade with medium and heavy weapons, in a scene that seemed to be a response to the Houthi parade 

However, the reactions to the show were harsh, especially from the people of Marib on social media, who expressed their discontent, wondering about the disappearance of all these weapons during the recent battles of Marib, which witnessed the fall of the districts of Marib one after another in the hands of the Houthi militia, and the tribes remained the only ones trying to repel the militias, which now control 12 out of 14 districts.

The same situation applies in Taiz, whose people questioned the feasibility of the military parade in light of the stagnation of the front with the Houthi militias for more than 5 years, and half of the province’s area is still in the hands of the militias that have besieged the city since the beginning of the war, and the government is now begging them to implement its obligations in the terms of the armistice by lifting the siege and opening the roads around Taiz.

In addition to the defeat, what unites the two sides of the parade in the north is the attempt to hide the mentality of the militias and the mobilization that governs their behavior since the beginning of the war and not to go towards building or establishing a real army organized with professional military leaders despite the availability of capabilities, and instead continuing to manage the battle with what can be gathered of fighters and entrapment them to the battlefield, even if the result is successive defeats and heavy human losses, where defeat is in their dictionary “divine punishment” or “conspiracy” and not a mistake in performance.

Also, these offers, according to what the two parties deem, grant them immunity from any accountability or account for the duties of the authority towards society in the areas of their control in exchange for the acquisition of the revenues of these areas, under the pretext that the battle is still ongoing with the enemy and that the armistice is only a break to prepare for the next round of  the war.