For a time, President Donald Trump could plausibly say this wasn't just his fight. The previous administration of Barack Obama tacitly greenlit the 2015 Saudi intervention into what was then a civil war in Yemen. Four years later, the conflict has metastasized into a grim regional conflagration, pitting a U.S.-backed Saudi and Emirati-led coalition against the country's Houthi rebels, whose ties to Iran have only grown tighter amid the fighting.
Accurate figures are hard to come by, but it is estimated that 50,000 Yemenis have been killed in the war so far, including dozens of civilians slain in Saudi airstrikes using U.