Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, joined by Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Sudan, have started a military campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen. The wrath of Arab armies is manifesting itself, not against their enemies, but in an internal conflict in an Arab country. 

All of these countries sat idly as thousands of Gazans were massacred by Israel last summer. They watched as what was left of  Palestine was stolen, Iraq was invaded and destroyed and Syria fell into the abyss of civil war. In many cases, Saudi Arabia was a leading force in the aggression against fellow Arab people. 

The Sudanese government cannot preserve the country’s unity or help its starving people, but is sending troops to Yemen. Egypt has been actively participating in oppressing the Palestinian people by besieging the Gaza Strip and cooperating with Israel to keep Gazans impoverished. The Egyptian authorities are also struggling to battle ISIS-linked militants in Sinai; yet they somehow committed armed forces in an internal conflict in a fellow Arab country.

The Saudi-led coalition claims to be defending the legitimate authorities in Yemen, while it sponsored and supported the coup against the democratically elected Egyptian president, Mohamad Morsi.  

Yemen has become “ground zero” to the regional proxy war that will harm all Yemenis and the entire Arab World equally. 

It is suffering. Countless factions with different ideological and sectarian background are battling for power. 

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the global terrorist organization’s most lethal branches, has claimed Yemen as its home and has waged terrorist attacks against Yemeni security forces and civilians. While AQAP has seized larges swaths of territories in Yemen over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has not fired a single bullet at the terrorists in defense of Yemen. Similarly, the monarchy, whose king is dubbed “the Protector of Two Holy Sites”, did not fight ISIS, which is destroying the image of Islam, as fiercely as it is fighting the Houthis.

The political terrain of Yemen is complicated. The followers of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, Houthis, Islamist parties, President Abd Rabbuh Hadi’s followers and southern separatists all have conflicting agendas.

The Saudi-led intervention will only add flames to the chaos that could destroy Yemeni society and spread violence across the Gulf, including on Saudi soil.

The largest Gulf monarchy should have called for peace in, not waged war on, Yemen, the cradle of Arab civilization. 

There can be no military solution to this crisis. 

The only way for Yemenis to fulfill their democratic aspirations— which they expressed during the 2011 revolution— is to set their weapons aside and address their grievances and demands peacefully.  Yemeni factions must get back to the dialogue table in Yemen and rise above their differences to create a power sharing system or be left with only a burnt country to fight over.