On the weekend of March 15-16, the U.S. launched a wave of air and missile strikes against Yemen, killing 53 people, including 30 civilians, according to reports from the  Yemeni Health Ministry. Along with the bombs came Trump’s Nazi-like threats of more violence to come. After that first murderous attack, Trump vowed to use “overwhelming lethal force like nothing you have seen before.” And he said, “Watch how it will get progressively worse. It’s not even a fair fight, and never will be. They will be completely annihilated!”

The U.S. attacks are supposedly aimed at the Houthi militia forces (reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who control much of Yemen, and who are allied with Iran and against the U.S. and Israel). The Houthis periodically have used their position on the Red Sea to fire missiles and drones at Israeli, U.S. and other ships. This has had a crippling effect on commercial shipping in that strategic waterway. After a pause of several months, the Houthis began launching these attacks again, and this is what supposedly triggered this new wave of U.S. attacks.¹ 

But rather than focusing on the Houthi forces, the U.S. has explicitly altered its military doctrine to kill more civilians than in past attacks. Two defense officials told the website Military.com that there is “less reluctance to hold off striking targets based on the casualties that may result.” And according to Human Rights Watch, “They've been striking residential areas at night while people are at home, and in at least one case, killed an entire family of civilians.” 

Then on Saturday, March 22, the U.S. attacked the airport and seaport in the coastal city of Hodeida and three other seaports. Yemen, an extremely poor country on the Arabian Peninsula, has been wracked by civil war since 2014. This war has greatly increased the poverty and suffering of its 40 million people, who have endured waves of starvation, famine and disease, and they are highly dependent on imports of food and other aid. Now this new barrage of U.S. attacks on important civilian infrastructure is bound to cause even more suffering.

Not only that, the U.S. is using the situation in Yemen to threaten Iran. Trump said that if the Houthis retaliate against the U.S. attacks on them, Iran would “suffer the consequences.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed this, writing on social media Saturday that “Houthi attacks on American ships & aircraft (and our troops!) will not be tolerated; and Iran, their benefactor, is on notice.”

The situation is in flux and the intentions and capabilities of the different warring reactionary forces are not clear. But what is clear is that as long as these reactionaries and the capitalist-imperialist system that spawned them all dominate the planet, the people will continue to suffer and the danger of even more massive and devastating war will loom ever larger. 

As the bombs fall and the rockets fly in Yemen, and the murderous threats of fascists and imperialists spread fear everywhere, the following words of revolutionary leader Bob Avakian stand out more than ever as an inspiring and fortifying guide for the masses of people:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.