Alistair Campbell

And then in the Arab Spring, 2011, the Houthis who are up in the north, who are these Zaydi Houthis who are Iranian connected, begin to advance south.

And I remember visiting the British ambassador in Yemen,

We were just north of Sana'a.

And suddenly the body, you know, the way the security team comes running to you.

And the story was the Houthis had come.

We all had to jump in our car and head south.

The Houthis then took Sana'a in 2014.

And then people remember Saudi Arabia and UAE together.

So Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammed bin Zayed intervened in a very, very brutal campaign where Saudi Arabia and UAE combined.

tried to drive the Houthis back, tried to seize the port of Hodeidah.

Our friend Andrew Mitchell was to be found frequently traveling out to Yemen and raising it in the House of Commons.

There were huge demands to cut arms supplies to Saudi Arabia to stop them from bombing Yemenis.

Yemen became this humanitarian catastrophe.

70% of people in receipt of aid, nearly 2 million people starving, millions displaced.

And then finally, about three years ago, it settled down a bit.

And it settled down into a de facto division between the Houthi who still control Sana'a, most of the population of the country, the north of the country.

They're the people who've been raining rockets on Israel and attacking people in the Red Sea and being attacked in turn by the UK and the US.

And then in the south,

This government, which was an alliance between factions with the UAE and factions with Saudi.

And so everything seemed to be stable until, to everybody's absolute astonishment, the beginning of December, the UAE-backed factions started attacking the Saudi-backed factions.