Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council’s Tired Requests for More Money to Liberate Sana’a

Media outlets loyal to the Riyadh-backed government, citing unofficial sources in Muscat, say that the Houthis have set three conditions for reaching a de-escalation agreement with Saudi Arabia: a lump-sum payment of $5 billion, unrestricted flights from Sana’a airport, and the reopening of maritime trade through the port of Hodeidah. Saudi commentary counters that if Riyadh caves in to extortion, the Houthis will simply double their demands. Instead, Saudi strategists argue that Saudi authorities should dedicate that $5 billion to “liberate Sana’a” and inflict a total defeat on the Houthis.

Discussion should not occur absent context. The $5 billion proposal is now the fourth time since 2015 in which strategists have presented a large financial request as the missing ingredient for a decisive military victory in the north, but every previous offensive ended in collapse for the government and their backers in the northern regions, despite air cover and regional support from the anti-Houthi coalition.

In late 2015, as coalition operations began, government forces advanced from Marib through the Nihm district east of Sana’a to the outskirts of the capital, seizing strategic hills and camps that once belonged to the Republican Guard. But internal fragility and divisions prevented them from consolidating that advance and turning it into the liberation of the capital. The collapses followed.

In August 2019, a Saudi-backed Salafi force from the Al-Fath Brigade fell into a Houthi ambush at the border pass of Naqil Jabara, leaving hundreds dead or captured. Then came the fall of Al-Jawf province—the largest province bordering Saudi Arabia—in early 2020, in what resembled an orchestrated handover: units linked to the Islah Party—the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—withdrew without combat, opening the road for a rapid Houthi advance toward the provincial capital, Al-Hazm, and most of its districts.

The collapse extended to the outskirts of strategic Marib, where the Houthis exploited the fall of Al-Jawf to press the western and northern lines and threaten oil fields and camps for the displaced, while scattered setbacks were recorded on the Al-Bayda and Taiz fronts owing to poor coordination and internal rivalries. These successive retreats exposed the fragility of the northern front and showed how disputes within the government camp became an accelerant for Houthi expansion at the expense of the border regions. Since January 2026, Saudi Arabia has elevated the Islah Party in political and military structures, even as corruption and malfeasance drain away the resources under its factions’ control.

More troubling, no operational plan or timeline has ever accompanied repeated claims of a “decisive battle.” The danger is not only that a “decisive battle” might fail to achieve intended results, but also that failure could negatively impact the southern front. Failure is likely to come with Houthi expansion along the southwestern coast, where the Houthis, with Iran’s support, would look to cement their strategic objective of securing the Bab el-Mandeb.

The southern theater, by contrast, offers the opposite picture. The southern resistance liberated the city of Aden from the Houthis in July 2015, and the Hadrami Elite Forces retook the city of Mukalla from Al Qaeda in April 2016. Southern formations then took part in the West Coast operations toward Hodeidah in 2018, and in reinforcing fronts beyond their own geographic area when called to do so. The difference was not in numbers, nor in the scale of regional backing, but in cohesion of command and fighting spirit. This alone is enough to refute the equation that reduces war to a bank check.

To gauge how resources are managed within the government’s security and military apparatus, a simple comparison suffices, between the scarcity of resources declared on the ground and the visible spending patterns of a segment of the senior generals and officials tied to the government in their residences outside Yemen. It is a gap that recurring international monitoring reports have flagged, and that warrants an independent audit.

The latest version of this request came through Abdullah Al-Alimi Baawazir—an Islah member in the Presidential Leadership Council. During his visit to London in July 2026, Baawazir met with British officials and pressed for expanded defense cooperation, training, and capacity-building support, informing his interlocutors that his government was about to launch a “decisive battle” to liberate Sana’a. More recently, he gave an interview with a prominent Saudi newspaper asserting that the liberation of Sana’a “has become imminent.” What sets his request apart is that he goes beyond funding to demand for air cover and direct Western military support.

Western decision-makers should treat the “liberation of Sana’a” bombast for what it is: rhetoric that seeks to substitute for strategy. Both Saudi Arabia and its Western backers should condition any support on independent financial monitoring and the exclusion of Islah, given its questionable allegiances and past betrayals.

The most productive path for Western engagement remains the one hosted by the Sultanate of Oman. Hans Grundberg, the United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, should work with the impartiality of an international civil servant across all parties—the representatives of the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, the government built on Saudi patronage, and the Southern Transitional Council—to draw up a framework for de-escalation grounded in verifiable conditions, and a roadmap that lifts Yemen out of permanent crises. The alternative—funding for a Presidential Leadership Council residing abroad—will not buy a victory.