Former Middle East Minister Says UK Has "Missed Opportunities" To Bring Stability To Yemen

As the UK and US continue to carry out joint air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen to little avail, former Minister for the Middle East Tobias Ellwood has warned that the UK government must learn from past mistakes in the region.

The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group, launched missile attacks in the Red Sea after Israel launched its attacks on Gaza. They claimed they were targeting Israeli-owned ships, but with much of the world's shipping passing through the Red Sea, many of the ships hit had no connections with Israel.

On Monday, the US and UK carried out their second joint air strike operation on Houthi targets in retaliation, aiming to deter the Houthis from causing further disruption to international trade. Following their first joint operation, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the Commons last week that without UK and US intervention, international security would have been weakened. However, later in the week, US President Joe Biden admitted that the air strikes had so far not worked to deter the Houthis from continuing to operate in the Red Sea.

Tobias Ellwood, Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Middle East and North Africa between 2014 and 2017, and was then the chair of the Defence Committee until last year, when he resigned after making controversial comments about Afghanistan being a “country transformed” since the Taliban seized power in 2021.

He told PoliticsHome that he thought it was “right” for the UK to carry out military action against the Houthis, but said the question should now be whether the UK government will “bother to lean in and understand the geopolitics of the country and try to finally end the civil war”.

According to Ellwood, the UK should