A little-known U.S. military operation in Yemen undertaken by the Biden administration displaced 531,000 people, according to reports from Yemen’s National Team for Foreign Outreach, reports Robert Inlakesh.
A man stands the rubble of a building destroyed in an air raid in a neighborhood in Aden, Yemen in 2019. (©2019 European Union/ Peter Biro/ Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Robert Inlakesh
MintPress News
In 2024, while all eyes were on Gaza, President Joe Biden launched a bombing campaign in Yemen that displaced more than 531,000 people.
Nearly 40,000 were driven from their homes by U.S. bombs alone.
It was called Operation Prosperity Guardian, and you probably never heard of it.
There was no congressional vote. No White House press conference. And yet by the end of the year, U.S. warplanes had hit schools, mosques, farms, ports and fuel trucks across Yemen, causing a humanitarian collapse that rivaled the worst years of the Saudi-led war.
Two reports issued by Yemen’s National Team for Foreign Outreach (NTFG), reviewed by MintPress News, have revealed staggering statistics about the impacts of Biden’s final military campaign against the war-torn Arab nation.
President Biden, in his first foreign policy speech in 2021, declared that ending the “catastrophic” war in Yemen would be a top priority. By then, the U.S.-backed war, primarily carried out by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had already claimed nearly 400,000 lives since its 2015 launch under Barack Obama’s administration.
[See: US strike on Houthi oil port kills 74 and injures 171]
In October 2023, the Ansar Allah-led government in Sana’a began intervening in the Gaza war, following Israel’s bombing campaign that killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. After launching missiles, the group imposed a blockade in the Red Sea on Israeli-linked ships. Rather than pursuing negotiations, the White House responded by deepening its military intervention in support of Israel.
This is peak American foreign policy… When asked if the strikes on Yemen are working Biden replies: “When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”
Literally saying “bombing these folks is useless, but we’ll keep doing it”. pic.twitter.com/otzJC6hzpS
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 19, 2024
In December 2023, then–Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the launch of a multinational naval mission called Operation Prosperity Guardian. Under this campaign, the Biden administration initiated airstrikes on Ansar Allah in Yemen without congressional approval or popular mandate.
According to the first NTFG report, the U.S.-led operation, alongside subsequent Israeli airstrikes, worsened Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, increasing the number of civilians in need of urgent aid from 18.2 million to 19.5 million in 2024 alone.
In other words, the U.S.-taxpayer-funded war effort pushed 1.3 million additional people into poverty last year.
The report also noted that U.N. officials “warned of the U.S., U.K., and Israeli attempts to disrupt Sana’a International Airport and the ports of Hodeidah to obstruct and suspend international humanitarian aid to Yemen, especially since these vital facilities are crucial humanitarian sites.”
That warning highlights what appears to be the intentional collective punishment of the Yemeni people. Nearly 80 percent of the country’s food is imported.
Sites damaged or destroyed in December 2024 included:
- 23 commercial facilities
- Eight petrol stations
- Two tourist facilities
- Six schools
- Six mosques
- 45 roads and bridges
- Six water tanks and networks
- Five seaports
- Four farms
- 13 food trucks
- Four fuel trucks
- 37 agricultural fields
The second NTFG report focused on internal displacement and humanitarian fallout. According to U.N. statistics cited in the report, 531,000 people were internally displaced in Yemen during 2024, with at least 38,129 of them forcibly displaced directly by military attacks.
In the final month of Biden’s presidency, the U.S. and its allies targeted an alarming number of civilian sites. The report states:
“Airstrikes targeted power stations in the Capital Secretariat (Sana’a) and Hodeidah, setting fire to critical equipment necessary for electricity production and leaving civilians without power. In addition to crippling Yemen’s electricity supply, the U.S.-U.K.-Zionist coalition launched attacks on key Red Sea ports in Hodeidah, including Al-Salif Port, Hodeidah Port, and Ras Issa Port. These strikes resulted in multiple deaths and injuries among port workers, disrupting vital trade and humanitarian supply lines.”
Though the Trump administration has intensified the war since taking office, the U.S. military campaign in Yemen now spans more than a decade. Indeed, until Israel’s assault on Gaza, it was widely considered the world’s worst man-made humanitarian catastrophe.
While under Biden, Ansar Allah was designated a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization. The Trump administration has since replaced that label with the more severe “Foreign Terrorist Organization” designation.
The new classification drastically impairs the ability of humanitarian groups to deliver aid, effectively criminalizing relief work in large swaths of northern Yemen.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show “Palestine Files.” Director of “Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.” Follow him on Twitter/X @falasteen47.
This article is from MPN.news is an award winning investigative newsroom.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I suppose that technically we can still call Trump’s genocide as the 2nd American Genocide of Yemen. The 1st American Genocide of Yemen was under Obama/Biden, and killed human souls by the hundreds of thousands. Millionaire Bernie used to put forward sure-to-lose resolutions to cast feel-good votes about opposing it. The genocide was accomplished by bombing the ports and international airports to block food aid from getting in.
Biden restarted the genocide, thus the 2nd American American Genocide of Yemen, because he needed to protect the Israeli-American Genocide of Gaza, as the Houthis had the content of character to try to prevent that latest American Genocide. Thus, Biden began bombing, with targets again focused on the international airport and the main port city.
Trump has stepped up the Biden/Harris 2nd American Genocide of Yemen, with more bombings of the ports. In the American tradition, when the original list of military targets did not cause the victims to beg for mercy, the list expands, apparently into more civilian targets like the drinking water supply systems. Remember, that Signal Chat was supposed to be the Great Victory in the minds of the participants. Then Hegseth brought in the B-2s and the super-duper Bunker-Busting Bombs. With the bombing of the water plants, Hegseth seems to be pulling out the old Bush/Clinton-era Iraq not-a-war plans in that regard.
The whole thing is like Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, which began with high hopes in the Pentagon, but did not force the surrender of the Serbs, so the target list had to expand and expand to create more horror to try to force a submission. Clinton’s target list eventually included civilian trains, a TV station (for thought-crime) and the Chinese Embassy. We are seeing this again, as someone in DC for political reasons orders the bombings, then the bombings don’t win the war like the bombers had insisted would happen in their Great Plans, so the bombing expands and the targets become more civilian and terror oriented.
Welcome to America. Where we can add Trump’s Easter Bombings to a list that includes Nixon’s Christmas Bombings.
Biden, a self professed Zionist is as bad or worse than Binni and Trump. “How?”, You say. Because he should have known better that to back Israels genocide. I have to wonder what his “Pop” would have said about the blood bath there in Gaza?
To understand that evil does exist all one must do is look to Gaza!
When I was young, Americans were throwing Vietnamese out of helicopters as an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Its been a long, long time since I’ve doubted that evil does exist. If nothing else, I figured it out the first time my young eyes saw a bumper sticker that read “Lt. Calley Is A Hero.” (if you don’t get that reference, read more old Seymore Hersh).
When you figure out that you are growing up in a nation that promises to incinerate the world in Mutual Assured Destruction to make sure that bankers can keep on foreclosing people and so that the rich always keep getting richer ….. its not too hard to understand that evil does exist.
Zionists/Yankees…birds of a feather…