Al-Alimi orders a campaign to retake Houthi-held Yemen, including Sanaa

Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, said on Sunday that he had ordered the armed forces, security services and allied formations to begin operations to retake territory still held by the Houthis, including the capital Sanaa. Major General Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said Saudi Arabia had the right to defend itself against Houthi attacks and pledged full operational support until the militia was, in his words, eliminated.

Al-Alimi's wording was a commencement order, not a claim of arrival. "I announce today the commencement of military operations to reclaim the remaining territories of the republic and to extend the authority of the state and its institutions across the entire national territory," he said. He told units to execute approved plans "until the country is liberated from the yoke of the terrorist militia". He said the campaign was not a war on Sanaa, Saada, Hodeidah, Amran, Dhamar, Ibb or any other province, and not a war on a sect or a tribe. He urged men fighting with the Houthis to use an amnesty and put down weapons.

The army's battlefield account on Monday was a set of counts. It said 1,747 Houthi fighters had been neutralised in 1,122 operations across Saada, al-Jawf and Taiz and along the western coast. Neutralised, in this usage, covers killed, wounded and captured, and the split was not published. The figure is a government number. The Houthis have not confirmed it. Al Jazeera reported that the order followed weeks of heavy fighting and Houthi advances on the Red Sea coast and around Taiz, the city that has sat on the front since the early years of the war. A government claim of a taken district sat alongside those Houthi gains. Both can be true of different hills in the same week.

The war had been treated as frozen after the 2022 UN-brokered truce expired without a formal renewal and after years of intermittent Red Sea ceasefire talks. Fighting did not stop. It dropped in intensity, then rose again on the coast as Houthi forces, already firing on shipping in the Red Sea through the wider Iran war, pushed on the ground toward government lines. Al-Alimi's order is the political answer to that push: a decision to stop treating the map as stable. Saudi support, in al-Maliki's sentence, ties the campaign to Riyadh's own account of Houthi attacks on the kingdom, which is the justification the coalition has used since 2015.

The geography he named is the Houthi core and the coast that matters for the strait and the port. Sanaa has been in Houthi hands since September 2014. Saada is the movement's home governorate. Hodeidah is the Red Sea port through which most northern food and fuel still moves when the UN inspection regime functions. Taiz is the southern hinge. A campaign that "reclaims the remaining territories" is a campaign to reverse a decade, not a raid. No timetable was attached. No order of battle was published. The amnesty line is an attempt to peel tribal fighters off the Houthi payroll before the advance, a method government commanders have used in Shabwa and Marib with mixed results.

Iran's role sits one step back in the public statements. Al-Alimi called the Houthis a terrorist militia. He did not, in the passages carried on Monday, make the operation conditional on a US or Israeli move in the Iran war. Al-Maliki's pledge of operational support is Saudi, not American. Washington's arms notices this week were for the UAE, Egypt and Kuwait, not a fresh Yemen package. Readers should not fold this order into the Hormuz talks. It is a ground campaign announced in Aden, backed in Riyadh, aimed at a map the Houthis still hold in the highlands.

The test in the next 72 hours is whether "commencement" produces a named town changing hands, with a date and a unit, or whether the 1,747 figure remains the only number on the page. Taiz and the coast are where that number will be checked first.