Yemeni Civil War: Timeline & Latest Developments

Yemen’s civil war entered its modern phase in September 2014, when Houthi forces, a Zaydi Shia movement also known as Ansar Allah that had fought the government intermittently since 2004, swept into the capital Sanaa and forced out the transitional government installed after Yemen’s 2011-2012 uprising. Within months the Houthis, allied with military units still loyal to ousted former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, pushed south toward Aden, and President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi fled the country. Saudi Arabia, at Hadi’s request, assembled a nine-country coalition and launched an air campaign in March 2015 aimed at restoring his government, a move that turned a domestic power struggle into a regionalized war that, in one form or another, has now run for nearly twelve years.

The conflict’s early years were defined by large set-piece battles and a mounting civilian toll. Coalition-backed forces recaptured Aden in mid-2015, but the front lines around Taiz and the northern highlands hardened, and Saleh’s fatal split from his former Houthi allies in December 2017 removed any near-term prospect of a negotiated end. Human Rights Watch had already counted close to 6,000 Yemenis disabled by the war within its first nine months, and by 2018 the UN was warning that a coalition assault on the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, the entry point for roughly 80 percent of the country’s food and medical imports, could kill up to 250,000 people in a worst case. That offensive stopped short of the port itself after the December 2018 Stockholm Agreement produced a negotiated ceasefire, one of the few durable de-escalations of the war’s first half-decade. Taiz, meanwhile, has faced a different kind of siege: Human Rights Watch has documented a Houthi blockade of the city, in place since 2015, that it says amounts to collective punishment of roughly three million residents, alongside water-rights violations it attributes to government-aligned forces as well.

The humanitarian dimension of this war is, by most measures, its defining feature. The World Health Organization tracked more than one million suspected cholera cases by the end of 2017 alone, part of what health authorities have called the largest and fastest-growing cholera outbreak in modern recorded history.

By late 2018, the UN was warning that 14 million Yemenis, half the population, faced imminent famine. UN OCHA’s most recent needs assessment, published in March 2026, still counts 22.3 million people, more than two-thirds of Yemen’s population, requiring humanitarian assistance, 18.3 million facing acute food insecurity, and more than 2.2 million children acutely malnourished. An estimated 4.8 million people remain internally displaced, making Yemen one of the largest internal displacement crises in the world. The UN’s $2.16 billion 2026 appeal had secured only about 13 percent of its target as of May, a funding gap that UN officials say is now closing hospitals and cutting food rations as much as active combat is. A UN Development Programme study is the most recent authoritative estimate of the war’s overall death toll: 377,000 people through the end of 2021, direct and indirect causes combined, a figure UNDP has not updated since, meaning the true current toll is unknown but almost certainly higher.

A second storyline, distinct from the Houthi-government fight, runs through the war’s southern half. The UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, formed in 2017, seeks independence for the former state of South Yemen and does not accept the government’s claim to a unified country, even though both are formally aligned against the Houthis. The STC seized Aden from the government by force in August 2019, accepted a Saudi-brokered power-sharing deal that November, then rejected it and declared self-rule in April 2020. That underlying tension exploded again in December 2025, when the STC launched a rapid offensive that briefly captured most of the south, only for a Saudi-backed government counteroffensive to retake Aden and most lost territory within five weeks, ending in the STC’s disputed announcement of its own dissolution. Yemen’s other major flashpoint since late 2023, the Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping and Israel-linked targets, is a related but separate story covered on WeaponSpecs’ Middle East proxy wars tracker; this page focuses on the fighting between Yemeni parties themselves.

Diplomatically, the war has moved in fits and starts since a UN-brokered truce took effect in April 2022. That truce, extended twice, formally lapsed in October 2022, but both sides have avoided a full return to nationwide fighting in the years since, helped along by a March 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China and direct Saudi-Houthi talks in Sanaa the following month. In May 2026 the government and the Houthis signed the war’s largest prisoner exchange, releasing roughly 1,700 detainees after 14 weeks of talks in Amman. UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg told the Security Council that June that the resulting calm was real but fragile: front lines remain entrenched, the south’s status is newly unsettled after the STC’s collapse, and no direct political negotiations toward a comprehensive settlement have taken place in years.