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Concern grows of widening Middle East conflict

The Iran-backed Houthi rebel movement vowed to continue attacking ships in the Red Sea on Friday, hours after the U.S. and U.K. carried out strikes targeting the group in Yemen in retaliation for stepped-up Houthi attacks on shipping in the vital Middle Eastern waterway. President Biden announced the U.S. and allied strikes in a statement Thursday night, which were conducted with assistance from Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands.

Iran conducted its longest range ballistic missile attack on Monday night, destroying the home of a Kurdish businessman in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

Among five civilians killed in Erbil were Kurdish business mogul Peshraw Dizayee and his family, including his 11-month-old daughter.

Key Takeaways:

1. The United States, Egypt, and Qatar are pushing a new, multi-part plan to end the Israel-Hamas war. The US-Egyptian-Qatari plan will enable Hamas to reconstitute and present a continued threat to Israel. This proposed plan, as reported, does not include any provisions to disarm Hamas.
2. Israeli forces raided an underground tunnel in a civilian area of Khan Younis that previously held Israeli hostages.
3. Palestinian militias conducted five indirect fire attacks targeting southern Israel on January 21.
4. Palestinian fighters clashed with Israeli forces in four locations across the West Bank on January 20 after CTP-ISW’s data cutoff.
5. Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) conducted four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel targeting Israeli towns and military facilities on January 21.
6. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility for two one-way drone attacks targeting US positions in Syria on January 21.

IDF estimates published earlier this month claim that Hamas has lost 9,000 terrorists so far in this war. As of January 9, Hamas had also lost two brigade commanders, 19 battalion commanders, and 50 company commanders.

There is a saying that the “devil is in the details,” and when it comes to war, counting the number of people “eliminated” may be less helpful than it seems; there are several reasons for this.

Key points

This brief explores the advantages and drawbacks of various U.S. policy responses to attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Ansar Allah—the Shia Islamist group commonly known as the Houthi Movement. The Houthis emerged from the Yemen Civil War as the de facto government in northern Yemen and now control roughly 70 percent of the country’s population. The group was considered a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. government until it was delisted in 2021 over humanitarian concerns about the impact of the designation.1

Five military advisers serving for the IRGC mission in Syria were martyred along with several Syrian forces in an Israeli attack on a three-story residential building in the Mezza neighbourhood of Damascus.

Iran condemned in the strongest terms the killing of five military advisers of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in an Israeli attack on Syria, saying it reserves the right to respond to the “organized terrorism” of the Israeli government.