Not to lose the war

The recent losses in the south of Marib have prompted politicians and journalists - and militarily curiously - to contend in prose the hadiths of Qadariyyah about the inevitability of victory and the defeat of the Houthis.

The vertebrae are among them, the vertebrae of his neck are almost broken by the length of his spine, waiting to see Saudi Apache helicopters hovering over the fronts of the retreating legitimacy to eliminate the Houthis and fuse them.

And he has been wondering, after every setback, about the secret of the Royal Apache not being involved in the fighting!

No Yemeni with a clear conscience and an honest interest wishes an inch to fall into the hands of the Houthi fascism, but the lack of further loss is not guaranteed by the categorical imperatives that this directorate or that governorate will not smell the rancidity of the Houthi invader or see his dark and hateful face, but rather work, change and quit the tactics, maneuvers and tours of the past maliciousness and rivalry between the forces of the legitimate internal front.

Motivated by that, this article attempts to simplify a discussion that aims to reach an answer to the question of the hour: Why are we almost losing the war? It is a question that the war authorities concerned with legitimacy should have put on their table since the beginning of 2019, when all battles began to end in disappointing losses.

Not command liberation

This system is not worthy of accomplishing the task of liberation, nor is it capable of it.

The regime headed by President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi is a synthesis system, which was assembled piece by piece and glued to some of the most fragile relationships glue.

This is because this system is not led by a united political organization behind its authority, and is aware that its responsibilities will not be borne by others, so it will carry them out, and that the authority it holds is equivalent to the state, so it is defending one of them in saving the other. There is no problem then if he fought without the authority or the state. The important thing is to conduct the war as it should.

Nor is it in the sectarian system - although its men have the characteristic of sectarianism, but in isolation - so its members are drawn into some kind of fanaticism, then it is not the product of a democratic process in a democratic era, so its members resign when the matter falls into their hands and it becomes clear to them that they are unable to meet the requirements of the public that brought them to power .

The most egregious of all the advanced classifications is the fact that this regime is not a liberation command, no matter what capabilities, weapons and men fall into its hands.

His men are professionals of exchanges: all of them used to abandon the sinking boats and jump into lifeboats that would take them directly to the new ruling palace, until the power became for them fun and pure commerce devoid of its basic content, as political sovereignty and an opportunity to create collective glory, and so they were overcome by the merchant's nature and his character: the frightened merchant Fillers, exchanges, and the historical opposite of the revolutionary, not to mention that almost all of them are merchants in the literal sense.

As long as the nature of the current system is in this way of disintegration and low ambition, the ultimate personal glory of any of its men does not exceed the gathering of the greatest amount of self-interest, which with it they appear as discordant pieces that each one dominates behind the benefits that draw it and hardly attracts the magnet of power to his circle at different times .

Although President Hadi is one of the poles of the circle covered by these classifications, he is also burdened with huge responsibilities that his innate talents or his gray experience and stubbornness in the face of learning to face its huge burdens do not help him.

After nine years in power, and by following his career path since he was promoted to the commander of an armored company at the Al-Anad base, it has become possible to reduce the way the president works in that he is one of the best performers of his responsibilities from a position of assignment and receiving and the weakest of those who exercise them in leadership, and this will not even include the flavor of slander; Not all human capabilities are fused into a formative template for leadership.

And his rise to power increased by that strange happy coincidence that he was injected with the political parasitism and dependency that might have been infected by any person who found himself on the chair without making an iota of effort or taking a single difficult path to reach.

Is it objective to attribute the emptiness and estrangement between which the institution of the presidency falters to the weakness of the presidential faculties only?

Of course, no, and limiting the problem to this factor would be a naive proposition. Not all leaders of countries around the world are geniuses in leadership, but they are open to development and delegation and do not hinder the performance of the institution.

But the situation is different for Hadi, where the fear of losing the position is always motivated and the will to play on political and social contradictions is present with his lack of proficiency, and the problem is further complicated by the choices of those most important of his aides whom he chooses to put barbed wires in the fence that strikes him around his position, not to develop their capabilities in the performance of the institution of the presidency.

Amid the bleakness of the image coming from the presidential palace, the president flashes a glorious moment that no one will take away from him: the days of the winter of 2014 with the Houthis' sluggish rifle aimed at his temples, while his strength fades from fatigue, but he is prejudiced and daring, refusing to sign the Houthis' feverish demands at the price of the taste of virgin power.

Whether Hadi defends his position or his representative symbolism of the republic is written by him, but it is not enough to lean on him for the performance of the following years. It is also not acceptable to invest in the same situation to the fullest extent of absurdity, otherwise the matter will turn into blackmail. In fact, four years ago this absurd was the most present. And he is almost the only one who perseveres in the offices of the presidency and walks in its walks with the arrogance of those who occupy the highest positions.

If one of the conditions of the revolution is a revolutionary party that leads and organizes it, then the wars of liberation must have a revolutionary leadership that mobilizes its energies and believes in its content, and its liberating horizon is represented in its behavior and discourse.

The first characteristic of the liberation leaders is that they do not resemble the leadership of the regime lying on the autopsy table now. They are immoral people who are cast into the course of history, and their names are very bright and lofty landmarks. Their links are rooted and extended with freedom, struggle and revolution, and their legacy of struggle will shade to the end of history every spot on which fighters stand seeking freedom, progress, and liberation from oppression. They did not come in any era with fading features and stunted ambitions, as characterize the leaders of the current Yemeni experience.

Factional armies violated

The ruling factional forces in the liberated governorates are gradually transforming into authorities operating under the umbrella of legitimacy, but with independent relationships and behaviors.

With their transformation, these authorities began to transform at the same pace the formations of the army operating under their command into police forces whose main goal is to ensure the imposition of control and keep political competitors on the sidelines, fattening personal economies at the expense of the collapsing national economy, and contesting the civil administrative apparatus with its functions.

As a result, the fighting of these armies has become similar to the evasions of the commanding authorities over them. They do not fight as armies fight, nor as the students of liberation fight, but rather practice repression in the worst way in which the police repress.

The irony is that it is difficult to find the contributions of most of the dominant armies within the liberated areas in the honor of liberating the land where, today, they devote their mindless muscles to comrades-in-arms and property owners, or exert them in confrontations worthy of city gangs.

It took over the liberated areas after the smoke of battle cleared in order to complete the path of liberation, so it reneged on the pledge and reneged on the mission, planting its feet inside residential neighborhoods and on the sidewalks of shops and the exhausted commercial class stores; Where the attraction of levies pulls her.

Now let's take a cursory look at the behavior of the armies after they took over the liberated cities to continue the liberation process.

On the West Coast, and for three years, the theater of the terrible clash along the coast gradually changed until finally settled on its ruins, the Hazel Theater, on which Tariq Salih embodies the biography of Al-Ra’eed in popular photography: he jumps to the fight, rolls up his arms, and before the clash with his opponent, he retreats, shouting in the spectating crowd, “Catch it.” me lest I commit a crime.

The Stockholm Agreement constituted a half defeat, and the voluntary withdrawal of the "joint forces" would make it a complete defeat if it did not prove the superiority of the withdrawal decision later.

To the south, and exhausted by what the Transitional Council has done for six years in taunting the rest of the oppressed under the Houthi yoke with their tragedy, impersonating the proportions of liberating the southern provinces and allocating equipment and soldiers to expel successive governments, it has reached such an extent that it is unable to advance one step at the gate of Al-Fakher in Al-Dhalea.

And he keeps thundering, threatening the government that "his patience will not last."

As for Taiz, where the Islah party and the Taiz axis identify in actions and discourse, they are distracted from continuing the fight to liberate what remains within the scope of their operations, as they are occupied by two tasks that stand out from each other in ugliness: the first, stripping the past of those who liberated part of the city, with its only artery, of any virtue and magnanimity. The second is to unite dangerous criminals and precedents under the banner of their kindness and to put euphemisms in their daily chaos and crimes.

Moreover, millions of people whose nerves and blood were charged with refusal and motivation to fight Al-Houthi were filled today with despair and disgust.

They have become victims twice: once to the criminality of the Houthis and its festering priestly rottenness and thievery, and once to the treachery of the liberators who left them prey to the chaos of armed gangs and the rule of lawlessness and the disruption of public services to replace their services that continue to silently privatize the public service, taking advantage of the exceptional circumstances created by the war.

If the army is not disciplined and professional in combat during this war, it may never be disciplined. The military leadership cannot invoke war to justify the prevailing coma of the army, because wars have always represented favorable opportunities for creating, organizing and developing armies. History bears witness to the elite of the world's armies through different eras that arose and developed under the smoke of war and its terrible pressures.

War is a very serious and meticulous act, and it is impossible to overlook it with evasive readiness and stockpiling of weapons for private wars and then waiting for easy victories. And every warrior who pursues pseudo-tactics is abandoned by the land on which he is fighting. The land is very difficult to handle, and its soil is delivered only to those who fulfill his right of sacrifice, love and loyalty. My election, you can fake his cards. No, my possession has its different tactics, and it is no consolation that you are copying the tactics of soft politics to win a bloody war.

The best potential and energies out of battle

2500 km coastal and varied terrain from the mountainous to the plain, the flat and the millions who are disaffected with the Houthis and are ready to fight it, internal and external relations are available and the diverse energies are limitless outside the battle because the leadership of legitimacy does not excel in anything as it excels in turning its back on everything that is likely to win in the conflict.

A tour of one of those districts located within the range of the western or southern highlands, for example, is enough to amaze you as you see the mythical natural gifts that Yemeni geography offers, including fortifications, bunkers, high rugged heights, and areas covered with trees.

If the scale of the resistance faced by the Houthis is measured, it will hardly be mentioned in the scale of what is latent in the people and the land in terms of human capabilities and natural capabilities, and a history that is very rich in the examples of struggle and heroism against tyrants and colonizers, but no one has touched it to mobilize, organize and lead, rather it was allowed to the Houthis.

Even frequent announcements of mobilization do not go beyond what bureaucratic officials are familiar with withholding irregular employee pensions. Four years ago, the mobilization was no longer the only one being launched, and the next day its effect disappeared, and even the battles.

To support this transmitted narrative, here is the question: Is there a greater paradox than that the Legitimacy Army, which has at its disposal the 2500 km coastal area on the Arab and Red Bahrain, is complaining about the scarcity of weapons, while the coastless Houthis are pouring weapons upon them, one load after another!

The exclusion of the best forces and energies from the battle raises a worthy question as to whether the intelligence with its various services is still a real thing on the ground and is performing its function, and the extent of its involvement in the war.

The question here is not about intelligence whose function is equal to that of the security forces in monitoring and dismantling hostile cells, but rather the intelligence that is entrusted in times of war with the most dangerous and dangerous tasks, and its roles complement that of the army, but rather precede it beyond the battle lines and participate in an advanced contribution to preserving the national entity. When attacked by hostile strikes.

Therefore, it must be said again that war is the most dangerous human activity on the face of the planet, but never before has a fateful conflict been fought with such a pious sense of calm that the authorities of legitimacy confer on the way they manage the conflict.

And until the truth is complete.. the manifestations of fighting with circumstance and trivialities have no limits: How many ministers, governors, advisors and agents of various kinds sell the envelope on the communication sites daily! An official struggles to respond to bloggers whose specialty has been neglected electronic tampering, and at the end of it, he laughs at the ecstasy of a commander who has finished leading a victorious operation in the Houthi depth.

Peoples and nations faced the threat of complete obliteration. In conditions of great complexity and burdened with the horrors of the mountains, I resisted and fought with sticks, knives, spears, antique guns, and other predatory local inventions.

The Vietnamese covered their coasts with bayonets to prevent the landing of French paratroopers on them, the Philistines fought with stones and our great ancestors fought in defense of the Republic of September with sick and half-naked bodies and nineteenth-century rifles against armies of global mercenaries well-armed, and in Aden the observed revolutionaries confronted the army of the British Empire with wills from the Steel and hearts do not care about fear.

And if all the peoples who fought their oppressors and colonialists decided their fate depending on their luck of invincibility and the weapons in their possession at the moment of the onslaught of the colonizers or tyrants, documents of surrender would have been signed without a single shot being fired.

But she realized that the horizon of confrontation is not drawn by the difficult moments of the islands when the ammunition runs out or the forces sigh, but rather it is a horizon that extends throughout history, and those who ignite the spark of confrontation do nothing but pave its path and make an example. Were it not for their realization of that fact, despondency would have turned them on their faces in submission before their oppressors.

Only fools dare to compare the age of history with the age of their human generation, so that the incidents appear to them that their lives have acquired their final essence and they have no power to change it. This narrow understanding has always opened doors to despair leading to appeasement and then surrender.

Managing war with static perceptions

The wars of liberation are not a reproduction of workers’ revolutions that erupt in the cities, and the resurrection of the countryside is revolutionary. Rather, they are the product of their circumstances and, above all, of their environment and its contradictions.

In the first two years of the war, when the coalition ships were sailing to cover the land with armored vehicles and various equipment and their fighters slashing through the spaces, it was understandable to go to overthrow the cities before the rural directorates and give the fighting the character of regular war as long as its requirements are available.

However, since 2018, after the coalition’s operations were limited to air defense interventions and the emergence of new facts, the most important of which was the weak armament of the established army, the irregular pensions and poor rehabilitation of its members, and the expansion of internal clashes, it became necessary for the military leaders to immediately switch from regular war to a mixture of regular and mobile war, and to give the latter attention and priority.

According to the principle of learning war through war, it is assumed that seven years have benefited the planners of the war of legitimacy and taught them many lessons, among them is that pushing the army and resistance fighters to the cities to fight inside them and leaving the countryside to the Houthis was like someone who threw himself in the middle of a safe and closed it unaware that it could be opened only from outside.

The result of this was that the Houthis, who were left in the countryside, roaming and praying in them as they liked, marched on the cities and laid a deadly siege on them, turning their inhabitants into atrophied snails inside their shells, as in Taiz and Hodeidah.

To confirm the validity of this rule, Taiz did not find a rescue corridor that eased the severity of the tight siege except through its southern countryside, where forces from the resistance and the 35th Brigade were stationed and defeated the Houthis after intense battles.

What is worse is that the concentration of fighting in the cities and the evacuation of the countryside, where more than 70% of the population resides, provided the Houthis with what they could not have dreamed of in terms of human resources to attract them to their perverted racist idea and recruit them to fight in their ranks effortlessly.

Therefore, a war in our current conditions and a map of the distribution of natural and combative capabilities could only take the countryside, where the auxiliary topography and the deep knowledge of the loyalties of the popular base, as the starting point from which to bring down the cities.

During the height of the Houthi campaign on the Al-Kasara axis last March, I asked a source working in the army whether they had established defensive lines in the western vicinity of the city, and he replied in the negative. This was shocking, as the first thing that any military commander concerned with leading the defense of a city under attack thinks of is not establishing defensive lines, as it is an obvious question, but rather where he will establish them and in what style.

Armies defending cities tend to establish three defensive lines, each of which includes deep trenches, ground passages for infantry, minefields, and huge fortifications containing defensive positions and points equipped with anti-tank weapons and other armored vehicles, as well as concrete blocks, barriers, and various traps.

Late last April, the army had set up a defensive line following the battle line in al-Kasara, but with revisionist and simplistic criteria for the concept of the defensive line that was popular on the outskirts of World War II and developed by the rest of the wars of the twentieth century.

Ignoring the establishment of a defensive line with standards that would qualify it to repel a standard attack is one of the reasons responsible for the army’s inability to switch from defense to attack, or at least push the Houthi combat line extending from Raghwan to Sirwah back as much as possible for eight months.

To clarify, the entire force available to defend Marib has to adhere to its barricades and positions on the battle line to repel almost daily and very violent Houthi attacks, especially at the al-Kasara site. The human combat element, its mechanisms and small barricades had to perform what the defensive line would have guaranteed, which if it had been established during the warning of the Houthi attack and with guaranteeing standards, the army would have satisfied with half of its forces currently attached to the front line and moved half of them for maneuvers and striking Houthi supplies and creating protrusions in its area of ​​spread and circumvention.

Al-Houthi war planners became aware of the stagnation of the field situation in the western axis of the Marib front, so they preempted the movement, pushing their forces from the district of Nataa, which they had recently captured, towards Bayhan and all the way to Al-Juba.

The army was a thousand times more in need of the movement factor than the Houthis to improve and develop its field position. He had several options, some of which closed after the Houthi advance to al-Juba.

In al-Juba, the key to moving from defense to attack was to move a force from inside the city and bypass this moderately-terrained district and penetrate east of Sirwah to attack and destroy the left wing of the Houthi forces, extending from al-Zour to the southern edge of the district.

Disappointing that the Houthis took the initiative to develop their offensive by doing everything the army should have done to baptize its defenses and prepare the counterattack.

The steadfastness shown by the army and the Marib tribes over the past eight months remains a heroic, sacrificial and inspiring work. As for the feature of the stalemate in the defense plan, the authors of the plan, which seem to be mired in wear and tear and inspired by the ideas of the First World War with its fixed barricades, are blamed.

Although it serves its defensive purpose so far, the feature of its stalemate is that it restricted the army from maneuvering and movement and deprived it of development through war, which it would have gained by implementing modern combat tactics and methods that would penetrate the situation and accelerate the transformation of the battle. It is more suitable for fighting within cities, as it appears from its mechanism of action and requirements, in contrast to the poverty of its variants.

The price of the Houthi political bet

The Houthis’ temporary political bet is centered on the government not treading on the soil of the interior, as this is their entrance to fragmenting the weight of legitimacy until it erodes and equals the illegitimacy of their government.

Their bloody missile attack on Aden airport during the landing of its members last January was consistent with this bet. أما وقد حلت الحكومة في الداخل وواصلت العمل من عدن فلن يكفوا عن محاولات استهدافها مادياً ومعنوياً، وتصدير العمليات الإرهابية والاغتيالات وسائر النشاطات الإجرامية إلى المحافظات المحررة مع توجيه حوادث أمنية من تدبير استخباراتهم في منحى تقويض الثقة بين أطراف الشرعية وتعميق شكوكها إزاء بعض.

يتزامن كل ذلك مع مواصلة حرب لا هوادة فيها على الريال وتشديد سياسة الفصل الاقتصادي التي هيأت لمذبحة سعرية وانهيارات في قيمة العملة لا مثيل لها على الإطلاق.

ليس شاقاً ملاحظة أن هذه مخرجات لاستراتيجية غير عجلى وتعمل بنفس طويل وبتكامل محاورها العسكرية والسياسية والاقتصادية، ولمواجهتها ينبغي للشرعية وضع استراتيجيتها التي لا تنكفئ على الدفاع فحسب.

لم يتبق ترف حتى لكلمة لغو أو لحظة انتهازية واحدة على هامش المعركة. ولا ينطوي على مجاز، القول إننا نكاد نخسر الحرب.

لا وقت اليوم لغير الحقيقة والاتحاد والقتال، ومن يعتقد أن في الوقت فسحة للمناورة بالمواقف أو اكتناز السلاح لمعارك الهامش وتخصيب الخصومات البينية فلن يشفي حمقه غير حقيقة أن الحوثية لن توفره في الغد، بل سيكون أهون ضحاياها بوصفه ضحية بلا عزاء.

وها هي الحقائق اليومية تحيل حمولات الهذر والأوهام التي يجري تنضيدها وتزيينها يومياً حول واقعية السلام مع الحوثية إلى زبد يطفو عند قاعدة يرتفع عليها خياران استغرقا في الكبر حتى شغلا حيز ما عداهما:

إما القتال بقلب رجل واحد دون كينونتنا المهددة بالاقتلاع وهويتنا الثقافية الإنسانية ومواطنتنا، أو طاعون الحوثية.

من صفحة الكاتب على “فيسبوك”