User:Tarafa15/MBS Military interventions

Military interventions in Syria and Yemen
On 10 January 2016, The Independent reported that "the BND, the German intelligence agency, portrayed...Saudi defence minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman...as a political gambler who is destabilising the Arab world through proxy wars in Yemen and Syria." German officials reacted to the BND’s memo, saying the published statement "is not the position of the federal government".

Mohammed bin Salman leads the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who in 2015 seized Sana’a and ousted the Saudi-backed Hadi government, ending multilateral efforts towards a political settlement following the 2011 Yemeni uprising. Coalition airstrikes during the intervention have resulted in thousands of civilians killed or injured, prompting accusations of war crimes in the intervention.

Following a Houthi missile attack against Riyadh in December 2017, which was intercepted by Saudi air defense, airstrikes killed 136 Yemeni civilians and injured 87 others in eleven days. In August 2018, the United Nations reported that all parties in the conflict were responsible for human rights violations and for actions which could be considered war crimes.

Prince Mohammed is considered the architect of the war in Yemen. The war and blockade of Yemen has cost the kingdom tens of billions of dollars, further aggravated the humanitarian crisis in the country and destroyed much of Yemen's infrastructure, but failed to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital. More than 50,000 children in Yemen died from starvation in 2017. The famine in Yemen is the direct result of the Saudi-led intervention and blockade of the rebel-held area. In October 2018, Lise Grande, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, warned that 12 to 13 million Yemenis were at risk of starvation if the war continued for another three months. On 28 March 2018, Saudi Arabia, along with its coalition partner the UAE, donated $930 million USD to the United Nations which, according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, "...(will) help to alleviate the suffering of millions of vulnerable people across Yemen". The funds cover almost one-third of the $2.96 billion required to implement the UN's 2018 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan. Following the Houthi missile attack against Riyadh in December 2017, which was intercepted by Saudi air defense, Mohammed Bin Salman retaliated with a ten day barrage of indiscriminate airstrikes against civilian areas in Yemen held by Houthi forces, killing dozens of children.

Following the murder of Khashoggi, the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved a resolution to impose sanctions on people blocking humanitarian access in Yemen and suspend arms sale to Saudi. Senator Lindsey Graham said America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia “is more of a burden than an asset.” He also said, “The crown prince [of Saudi Arabia] is so toxic, so tainted, so flawed.”

After UN peace talks in Geneva in September 2018 failed in the absence of the Houthi delegation, subsequent talks in Sweden that December between the government of Yemen and the Houthi rebels resulted in an agreement to a ceasefire in the port city of Hodeidah to ensure the passage of imports and aid.