“There may be military needs, particularly in certain technical areas, and we would have no problem meeting them,” Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said in an interview after being asked whether the Houthis’ retaliatory strikes on Saudi Arabia were sufficient to activate the new Mecca Pact alliance.
“We see very serious attacks against Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” Fidan said, vowing that Turkey would “stand by our word” on its commitments to the alliance.
Besides military-technical support, Turkey is reportedly also mulling entry into a Saudi-led naval force in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Gulf of Aden – all areas where the Houthis have solidified their control over the past week.
Déjà vu?
Turkey’s military capabilities are nothing to sneeze at, with its forces deployed to Turkish Kurdistan, northern Iraq, Azerbaijan, Syria and Libya over the past decade to fight insurgencies or support Ankara-backed proxy forces, and its military hardware used in conflicts stretching from Karabakh to Ukraine.
But Yemen is another story. In nearly 400 years, Turkish Ottoman forces never managed to subdue the northern highland regions of Yemen – home of Zaydi Shia Islam and today, the Houthi movement. So fierce is Yemen’s historical reputation for thrashing its enemies that it became known as the “graveyard of Ottoman soldiers” due to the amount of troops lost trying to keep the empire’s grip on the region.
First occupied in 1538 as the Ottomans moved to secure Red Sea trade routes won from the Portuguese, Constantinople never succeeded in taming the Zaydi imams, who retreated to impregnable mountain fortresses, and waged nearly a century of warfare before totally expelling the Ottomans from Yemen in 1635.
When the Ottomans returned in the 1870s, the occupation proved even more disastrous, with their forces suffering up to tens of thousands of casualties each year at the hands of Zaydi tribesmen. In 1911, the empire essentially conceded defeat, exiting the region completely after 1918. The British, who had set up a protectorate in Aden in the 1800s, wisely decided not to try to conquer northern Yemen once the Ottomans left, leaving Yemen as the first modern Arab nation to achieve full, uncompromising independence in the 20th century.
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