The U.S. is deeper into Yemen’s civil war than it wants to admit

Houthi rebels in Yemen pose no direct threat to the United States, but that didn’t stop the U.S. from deploying a cadre of fearsome Green Berets to Saudi Arabia in support of the kingdom’s yearslong proxy war with Iran.

The New York Times broke the story Thursday that a team of about a dozen Green Beret commandos have been deployed on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen since December, helping the kingdom’s forces find and destroy Houthi missile caches and launch sites, among other roles.

The Times’ report, citing U.S. officials and European diplomats, is the latest indication that U.S. involvement in Yemen continues to deepen beyond what military officials have officially disclosed. The latest revelation is likely to agitate a vocal cohort in Congress that has questioned the U.S. military’s enduring presence in the war-torn country.

The Pentagon has remained cagey when it comes to official U.S. activity in Yemen, insisting that American troops are taking a supporting role in the Saudi-led campaign — one officials insist is limited to logistics, intelligence sharing, and the refueling of aircrafts. But the Green Beret operation appears to go beyond that capacity and features commandos working closely alongside Saudi forces to find and destroy Houthi rockets and launch sites.

For Adam Baron, a Yemen analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the revelation was not entirely surprising, but he said the lack of transparency over the deployment is concerning.

“Let’s face it: The U.S. and U.K. have been pretty deeply involved in this war since the outset,” he told VICE News “It’s not completely unreasonable that the U.S. would be providing support to one of its key allies in the region to prevent missile attacks heading to the border.”

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The U.S. military’s presence in Yemen continues to be highly controversial; the conflict has devastated the country, killing more than 10,000 people, displacing millions and causing what the U.N. has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The Saudi-led coalition bears responsibility for much of the civilian toll, according the United Nations.

Among the carnage wrought by the Saudi-led campaign was a strike on a wedding party in northwest Yemen last week that killed more than 20 people.

But the coalition’s ceaseless string of alleged atrocities hasn’t slowed American support, prompting critics on Capitol Hill to call for a rethink of the deepening U.S. involvement in a campaign that shows no end in sight.

“I think what Americans need to understand — who worry about terrorism — is that when a wedding party is bombed and innocent people are killed — that their relatives will never forget this,” Sen. Rand Paul told NPR last week. “And a hundred years from now, people from that village will be saying, 'Do you remember when the Saudis came with American bombs and bombed a wedding party and killed our ancestor?'”

U.S. military presence in Yemen isn’t limited to supporting Saudi allies, either. Special operators are concurrently carrying out a separate counterterror campaign against the country’s al Qaida affiliate. Under Trump, the air war on terror organizations active in Yemen has ramped up considerably; there were more than 130 U.S. airstrikes in the country last year, according to United States Central Command, compared to 38 in 2016.

Read: Yemen's war is destroying a generation of children

The Green Beret operation reportedly came about in response to the Houthis tactic of firing missiles across the border. After one was intercepted near Riyadh’s airport in November, Salman reissued a request to the U.S. to deploy troops in support, and the deployment was sent within weeks.

Regardless of whether the move was the right one, Baron said, the lack of debate over the operation was troubling, and it raises the risk of “mission drift.”

“Isn’t this something that should be the subject at the very least of some internal attention? It’s symptomatic of the expansion of the U.S. into a variety of different arenas of conflict that no one’s really paying attention to.”

Cover image: Smoke rises by a Saudi-led airstrike near the funeral procession of Saleh al-Samad, a senior Houthi official, who was killed with his six body guards by a Saudi-led coalition airstrike on April 19, in Sanaa, Yemen, 28 April 2018.