The Saudi war in Yemen is increasingly becoming an impossible war to win. With the death toll of Yemeni citizens reaching thousands and the near devastation of the country, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir can only write off the rising body count as casualties of war while assuring his audiences that Saudi weapons are precise in reaching their targets.

The Saudi military intervention may have reached a dead end six months after it started, despite announced victories in Aden and other southern Yemeni territories. The brief return of exiled Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to Aden in September on a Saudi airplane was meant to mark a symbolic Saudi momentary victory rather than an important turn signaling an undisputed positive outcome. The Saudi war on Yemen is not an inevitable war of self-defense forced on the leadership by Houthi expansion inside Saudi Arabia and undermining Saudi national security. Instead, it was a pre-emptive strike to inaugurate an aggressive Saudi regional foreign policy.

Civilian casualties are very high on the Yemeni side, while the Arab Coalition forces, mainly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are just beginning to experience the high human cost of war. In Saudi Arabia, the war claimed the lives of military personnel on the Saudi-Yemen border following retaliatory shelling by the Houthis and attacks inside Yemen. The war is bound to raise questions about the ability of Saudi Arabia to eliminate the Houthis and the influence of their backers on the Arabian Peninsula, namely Iran. Rather than undermining those pledges, Saudi fatalities have become part of the government’s nationalistic propaganda that the pre-emptive strike was necessary to avoid such outcomes. The war has led to what the Saudi leadership actually warned against in justifying it, even before the Houthis attacked Saudi territories. However, instead of a swift victory in Yemen, Saudis are now being killed inside their own country while their troops inside Yemen have been targeted in devastating attacks, such as the one in Marib in early September, when 10 Saudi soldiers were killed.

Victory in a regional war fought by airstrikes under a vague coalition, a limited number of ground troops from several countries and local Yemeni militias do not seem to be on the immediate horizon. The international military coalition the Saudis hoped for turned out to be only a mini-consortium of countries willing to participate. The Saudi war turned into a Saudi-Emirati alliance with other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries reluctantly supporting it. Oman was the only GCC country refusing to take part in the bombing. Qatar and Kuwait expressed support with only the former contributing ground troops. In addition to the UAE's very active role, Bahrain wholeheartedly backed Saudi leadership as the war narrative against Iran fits very well with the Bahraini regime’s objective of dubbing its own uprising as an Iranian conspiracy.