Al-Alimi asked Trump for support against the Houthis but won no military pledge, sources say

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ADEN, Yemen — Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council chairman Rashad al-Alimi asked President Donald Trump for US support against the Houthis in a telephone call on Sunday.

Trump gave no pledge of military support during the call, sources told Reuters.

The two men discussed the Houthi advance near the Bab al-Mandab strait, Asharq Al-Awsat reported.

Neither the White House nor al-Alimi’s office has published a readout. Accounts of the call rest on unnamed sources reported separately by Reuters and Agence France-Presse.

Al-Alimi asked for help to strengthen his government’s ability to confront the group, according to those accounts.

AFP said a source in al-Alimi’s office described the request on Monday. Reuters cited two sources, one Yemeni and one Western, for the absence of a military commitment.

Officials around the Yemeni presidency treated the call itself as a signal of political backing, Asharq Al-Awsat reported.

Al-Alimi has chaired the eight-member Presidential Leadership Council since April 2022, when former president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi transferred his powers to it.

The council and the cabinet are based in Aden. The Houthis have held Sanaa since 2014.

The call came at the end of a week in which Washington prepared and then cancelled an air operation against the group.

The council was formed in April 2022 under Saudi and Emirati auspices and includes figures from several anti-Houthi factions.

Trump told advisers on Wednesday that he did not favour strikes, Axios reported. He reversed course after speaking to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and told the Pentagon to prepare an operation.

By midday on Sunday he had called it off. Crews were loading bombs onto aircraft at the time, according to Axios. The New York Times first reported the deliberations and Reuters also reported the cancellation.

The White House has not commented on that reporting either.

Trump has said more than once this month that the Houthis do not want to fight the United States. Fox News reported on Sunday that he said the group had undertaken not to attack American forces or interests.

The Houthis have made no public comment on that account.

The group reached the Bab al-Mandab approaches this month.

Fighters took the Red Sea port of Mocha on Sept. 10, Euronews reported. Within days they held the rest of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline and the island of Mayyun, also called Perim, according to Al Jazeera and the Times of Israel.

Houthi units also moved onto the Hanish Islands, the Times of Israel said. The group’s forces now sit about 20 kilometres from the African shore, Al Jazeera reported.

Bab al-Mandab is about 30 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, with Mayyun splitting the passage into two channels. Most shipping bound for the Suez Canal uses it.

Hodeidah, further north on the Red Sea, handles a large share of Yemen’s commercial and aid imports.

The Houthis widened their attacks on Saudi Arabia over the same period.

They claimed missile and drone attacks on sites in Riyadh and on an Aramco facility in Yanbu on Saturday, hours after a fire was put out at a fuel depot near King Khalid International Airport.

Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones were used. Saudi Arabia confirmed the group had tried to hit the capital with a ballistic missile, NBC News reported.

UN Security Council members condemned the attacks in a joint statement, saying they had affected civilian and energy infrastructure and caused civilian casualties, including women and children.

They called on the Houthis to halt the escalation and said Saudi Arabia has an inherent right to self-defence under international law.

The Council met separately on the Red Sea advance on Sept. 15. An assistant secretary-general told members the push toward the chokepoint raised the risk of a wider conflict.

G7 foreign ministers called the situation in Yemen an unacceptable threat to regional stability, to global energy security and to navigational rights in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab.

They called on Iran to end its arming of and support for the Houthis, which they said breaches Security Council resolutions 1747, 2140 and 2216.

The fighting has displaced large numbers of civilians. The International Organization for Migration recorded 104,796 people newly displaced inside Yemen by Sept. 16, across 17,461 households.

Taiz governorate was worst affected, with about 8,300 households displaced. A further 2,776 people had crossed to Djibouti by that date, the agency said.

The UN refugee agency allocated $2 million in emergency funding for Yemen on Sept. 21. It said its Yemen operation was 18 percent funded for the year and that it needed $25 million to reach about 231,000 people.

More than 22 million people in Yemen need assistance this year, according to the UN humanitarian office’s response plan published in March. It puts the number of acutely food insecure at 18.3 million.

The plan counts more than 2.2 million acutely malnourished children under five, including 516,157 severe cases, and 5.2 million internally displaced people. It seeks $2.16 billion to reach 12 million people.

Yemen’s war began in 2014, when the Houthis took Sanaa. It widened in March 2015, when a Saudi-led coalition intervened on the government’s side.

Asharq Al-Awsat did not say how long Sunday’s call lasted or who else took part.