War has begun: Yemen strikes back against Houthis | Episode 25

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Kelly Clarkson here with Wayfair. I know holiday magic starts at home, and Wayfair makes it easy. They have everything from Christmas trees and mantel decor to outdoor lighting and inflatables that I'll use year after year. Head to wayfair.com today. Wayfair, every style, every home.

John Kiriakou (0:15)

Hi everybody, I'm John Kiriakou, and welcome back to the Briefing Room. We have a lot today, like we do every Monday, but today seems to be unusually dense with news. First, Saudi-backed forces in Yemen have launched a major offensive to seize control from the Houthis. We have the latest for a hugely consequential presidential election in Brazil, major updates for John Kiriakou's travel guide, and there's been yet another death by an Epstein whistleblower. Authorities are calling it a suicide. I'm calling it bullshit. So let's begin with Yemen. There's an old White House trick here. It goes back to the 1930s. If you want to bury a story, you leak the story on a Friday night. Why? Nobody watches the news on Friday nights. The markets don't open until Monday morning. Two, nobody reads the news on Saturdays either. This trick gets a full storyline in the TV show The West Wing. They call it Take Out the Trash Day. It's based on reality. It's the same reason why every major military operation in President Trump's second term, the Maduro Capture, the start of the Iran War, has been carried out on a Friday night. Well, here's the headline from this week that the White House didn't want you to see. Check out what Axios is reporting. Trump's top national security aides meet secretly at Camp David on Iran and Yemen. Meeting secretly, President Trump's top cabinet members secretly gathered at Camp David on Friday to discuss next steps in the Iran War and the Saudi-Houthi conflict in Yemen. That information was given to Barack Ravid over at Axios, someone the White House likes leaking stories to, which is funny to me. I like Barack Ravid. He really breaks big stories. So why Axios and why Barack Ravid? Anyway, that's an issue for another segment. But anyway, according to three US officials, three separate officials, Vice President JD Vance, chaired a meeting with Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others. The others probably being the senior most members of the National Security Council. As far as what was actually discussed, a source says, quote, things were decided, unquote. I just left it at that. Things were decided. And like clockwork, just hours after that meeting, the Yemeni government, which is actually in exile in Saudi Arabia, launched 257 precision strikes against Houthi controlled sites, killing more than 700 Houthi fighters. We've got a clip of some of these Yemeni strikes on the capital city of Sanaa. JB, can we cut to that? This is taken from a cell phone. You can see smoke rising over the sites, over the cities. These are air strikes. They're apparently surface to surface missiles being launched by the, air quotes, Yemeni government from sites in southern Saudi Arabia. And it says, a spokesperson for Yemen's armed forces, which are aligned with the internationally recognized government, said forces were targeting what he described as vital targets. You can easily tell, though, that this is a civilian residential area. You know, I wanted to say one other thing about Sana'a before we, before we get too deep into this. I've mentioned a million times. I've been to, I've been to Yemen five times. I've been all over Yemen. I've been to some of the cities that are being utterly destroyed right now, places like Hudaydah or Mocha, certainly Sana'a.

Sana'a is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is thousands of years old, and it is one of the most beautiful places that I've ever been on Earth. I want to show you a picture, if I could, of what the old city of Sana'a looks like. These buildings are made completely of mud. They are more than a thousand years old, and they're highly decorated. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been on Earth, and it is under direct attack by the Saudis, by the Emiratis, indirectly by the Americans, by the Yemeni government because now the Houthis control Sana'a. This is going to be one of those epic tragedies, where we're going to lose something that's important to everybody in the world, and has been existing unmolested for more than a thousand years.

I also want to show you a map that shows current Houthi control.

Yeah, look at this. This is really important. The Houthis control the red part or whatever that is, orange, whatever. The issue is, that's where everybody lives. That purple part there, most of that is called the hadramut. Hadramut comes from two Arabic words, hadr, which means vegetation, and malt, which means dead. It's because it's so dry, it's so arid that nothing can live there, not even plants. So people don't live there. There are some nomadic tribes just constantly walking around. But the only part of Yemen that really matters is that red part. And that's the area of Houthi control. That's the area that the Yemeni government, which as I said, actually sits in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government are trying to take back from the Houthis. Now, my guess is, and this is an educated guess, that the reason why this attack is so massive is twofold. Number one, because the Saudis and the Yemeni government have been consistently losing this war. And they see that their final chance is slipping away from them. And so they figure we got to do it now or it's all over. Number one. Number two, the fact that the Houthis have successfully closed the Bab al-Mandeb, which is that entrance into the Red Sea, thus choking off ship traffic, whether it's oil-related or cargo, it's going to bring the global economy to a standstill. Things are bad enough in the Strait of Hormuz, but with the Red Sea essentially closed, makes it even worse, especially if you're a Saudi.