Senate Breaks with Trump on Saudi War in Yemen

The Republican-led Senate passed the resolution on Wednesday by a 54 to 46 tally, seeking to halt any US military involvement in the conflict, including providing targeting support for Saudi airstrikes, without authorization from Congress, Middle East News reported.

Introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee and Chris Murphy, the resolution will scale back Washington role in and American military assistance for Saudi war on Yemen ahead of the fourth anniversary of the day when the Riyadh-led coalition started its campaign against the impoverished nation.

The text now heads to the Democrat-led House of Representatives, which is expected to overwhelmingly pass the measure.

The vote on the war powers resolution will be the second within four months in the Senate.

Supporters of the Yemen resolution have faced a long and grueling road to get the legislation onto the president’s desk. The Senate first passed the measure 56 to 41 in December, but then House Speaker Paul Ryan refused to take up the resolution.

His successor, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did take it up, and the House easily passed it last month. But House Democrats inadvertently derailed the process by supporting a surprise procedural motion offered by Republicans to declare the chamber’s opposition to anti-Semitism. By attaching an unrelated amendment to the Yemen resolution, the House ended its “privileged” status, which would have forced the Senate to quickly take it up and send it to Trump.

The resolution sets the foundation for what could become Trump’s first presidential veto, as White House advisers stressed earlier in the day that Trump would veto the resolution.

Ahead of a key Senate vote on the measure on Wednesday, the White House formally indicated that Trump would veto a joint resolution calling for an end to US support of the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.

Sanders, a co-sponsor of the text, has called the Saudi war on Yemen a humanitarian and strategic disaster.

"The resolution we will vote on in the Senate tomorrow to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen is enormously important and historic. This war is both a humanitarian and a strategic disaster, and Congress has the opportunity to end it," Sanders said in a statement.

“The humanitarian catastrophe has only gotten worse in Yemen, and our intervention there is every bit as unconstitutional as it was then,” Sanders also stated, adding that “this time, after passing the Senate, I am confident it will pass in the House".

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing the government of former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the Ansarullah movement.

Weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals, as well as water and electricity plants, have been targeted, killing and wounding thousands.

Official UN figures say that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since the Saudi-led bombing campaign began in March 2015. But the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) believes that at least 56,000 people have lost their lives in the war.

Save the Children, a charity, has reported that more than 84,700 children under the age of five may have starved to death in Yemen since the Saudi regime and a coalition of its allies launched the brutal war on the already-impoverished nation.

Yemen is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis with more than 22 million people in need and is seeing a spike in needs, fuelled by ongoing conflict, a collapsing economy and diminished social services and livelihoods. According to the world body, Yemen is suffering from the most severe famine in more than 100 years.

A number of Western countries, the US, the UK, and France in particular, are accused of being complicit in the ongoing aggression as they supply the Riyadh regime with advanced weapons and military equipment as well as logistical and intelligence assistance.

An Oxfam representative stated that the US, UK, and French governments are behind millions of people starving in Yemen because they are “supporting this war".

“We have 14 million people starving,” Richard Stanforth, Oxfam UK’s regional policy officer for the Middle East, told RT, adding that "British, French, American governments are all behind this, they are all supporting this war".

A UN panel has compiled a detailed report of civilian casualties caused by the Saudi military and its allies during their war against Yemen, saying the Riyadh-led coalition has used precision-guided munitions in its raids on civilian targets.

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