Saudi Arabia faces mounting calls to end war in Yemen
The recent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has cast a shadow over Saudi Arabia's standing with Western countries, which are now pressuring the kingdom to bring an end to the suffering in Yemen.
The war in Yemen has been making headlines recently in what is considered a huge shift, given the weak media coverage it's received in the past. This shift is due not only to the growing humanitarian crisis, but also to rising political tensions between Saudi Arabia and the West in the wake of the October slaying of Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
The Yemen conflict also drew attention this week as Saudi Arabia halted, at least temporarily, its devastating assault on the strategic port of Hodeidah.
After the war in Yemen erupted in 2015, the UN issued Resolution 2216 that April, demanding an unconditional end to the violence. But the Saudis merely used the resolution to supposedly legitimize its coalition's attacks, designed to help bring back the ousted government to the capital, Sanaa. The following year, US Secretary of State John Kerry proposed an initiative during his last few months in office, calling for a stop to the Houthi rebels’ use of ballistic missiles, forming a national unity government and handing militias’ arms to a third party.
Since then, however, media and political attention to the war otherwise had been sparse and ineffective.
