The Red Cross says it has made its first shipment of emergency medical aid to Yemen, where a Saudi-led campaign of airstrikes shows no sign of letting up.

A cargo plane arrived Friday in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, carrying over 16 tons of medical supplies, according to a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Red Cross and other aid groups have been trying for weeks to rush aid to the Gulf state, where Shi’ite Houthi rebels have been fighting forces allied with the country’s president. 

Fighter jets belonging to a coalition of Sunni Arab states have for two weeks pounded parts of the country controlled by the Houthis, who are believed to be supported by regional powerhouse Iran.

The parliament of Pakistan – a predominantly Sunni state that borders Iran – voted Friday to not join the coalition. Lawmakers instead unanimously backed a resolution urging a negotiated end to the violence.

The fighting has created a humanitarian crisis with over 600 people killed and 100,000 forced to flee their homes. There is also a reported shortage of medical and other basic supplies in some areas.

The airstrikes so far have failed to stop the Houthi rebel advance across the country.

The Shi’ite rebels and their allied troops had extended their operations by Thursday into the central part of the city of Aden and the largely Sunni southeastern areas of the country.

Saudi coalition spokesman General Ahmed al-Asiri on Thursday denied the advance, stating that “small units that are isolated” had moved forward, and that they would be eliminated. He said communication links between rebel units had been cut.

The spokesman accused the Houthi rebels of storing weapons in residential areas, and warned that those also would be destroyed.

Saudi-led forces on Thursday bombed the Defense Ministry building in Sana’a, one of a series of air raids against rebel positions around the capital city.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday compared the Saudi bombing campaign to genocide, and warned Riyadh to stop “this criminal move.”

Tehran has said it is sending Iranian warships into the waters off Yemen. Washington, for its part, has increased its support for the Saudi coalition with weapons and intelligence sharing.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that Washington is “very concerned” at Iran’s actions.

Speaking on the PBS Newshour, Kerry said the U.S. is closely monitoring Iranian support for the rebels, including “supplies that have been coming from Iran” and “a number of [Iranian] flights every single week” into Yemen.

Kerry said the U.S. – which has supported the campaign of Arab airstrikes with weapons, intelligence, and other support – is “not looking for a confrontation, obviously.”

“But we’re not going to step away from our alliances and our friendships, and the need to stand with those who feel threatened as the consequence of the choices that Iran might be making,” he added.

Rebel fighters and troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted in 2011, have been trying to capture Aden, one of the last strongholds of forces backing the country’s internationally backed president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Fighting inflames nationalism, sectarianism

As Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen’s Houthi militia enters its third week, a surge of nationalist fervor is sweeping the conservative Sunni Muslim kingdom, bringing with it a sharp sectarian edge.

The Saudi authorities have avoided using overtly sectarian language to describe the Houthis but many clerics, journalists and social media users have shown no such restraint.

A Tweet from hardline Sunni cleric Sheik Nasser al-Omar to his 1.64 million Twitter followers the day after air strikes were announced described Shi’ites using the derogatory term “rejectionists.”

The use of such language, even by private individuals, carries risks for the kingdom in a conflict where the Houthis present themselves as defenders of a local religious tradition against Sunni extremism that they say is propagated by Riyadh.

While Yemen’s complex internal conflict is not yet dominated by friction between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Yemeni analysts have repeatedly warned that sectarianism is a growing danger and could lead to a dangerous escalation in fighting.

Many Saudis have characterized the strikes against the Houthis as Riyadh assuming the mantle of Sunni leadership in what they see as a long-overdue response to a perceived decade of Iranian aggression in Arab countries using Shi’ite proxies.

Local press reporting on the military campaign, officially known as “Operation Decisive Storm,” has overwhelmingly portrayed it as successful, largely ignoring reports of civilian casualties while lavishing praise on the kingdom’s rulers.

National identity in Saudi Arabia is closely bound up with the strict Wahhabi Sunni school, which views Shi’ism as heretical, and whose leading clerics sometimes publicly cast doubt on whether Shi’ites are truly Muslim.

The government has in recent years striven to avoid openly sectarian language itself, and sent princes and senior officials to attend the funeral of Shi’ites killed by Sunni militants in an attack in November.

Last year it detained a cleric who had posted Tweets celebrating the killing of Houthis by al Qaeda members in Yemen using explicitly sectarian language.

‘Like the lion attacks his prey’

However, members of the Shi’ite minority complain of systematic discrimination. Riyadh denies this but Saudi Arabia’s state-appointed religious establishment makes frequent attacks on the sect’s doctrines and history.

“If they (Shi’ites) manage to win and control the state, they ravage Sunnis: clerics, women, children, the rulers and the ruled. They attack just like the lion attacks his prey,” said Farid al-Ghamdi, a cleric at Mecca’s Umm al-Qura seminary in a sermon visible on YouTube.

That kind of scare-mongering has been evident in the Saudi press as well.

A report in the daily al-Medina newspaper last week cited “military experts” as saying the Houthis wanted to turn Yemen’s capital Sanaa into “an entirely Shi’ite city by 2017” and that the air strikes would thwart “this Iranian plan.”

Sunni social media users and clerics often align Shi’ites with Tehran by using the term Safavid, the 16th century Persian dynasty that popularized Shi’ism in Iran, which plays on both sectarian and Arab nationalist sentiment.

Yemen’s Zaydi Shi’ite sect is very different to the Shi’ite school followed in Iran, and while the Houthis have clear links to Tehran, they appear to be more independent of Tehran than its proxies elsewhere in the region.

But in the fevered atmosphere of a military campaign, such distinctions have a habit of disappearing.

“Decisive Storm came to sever any ambition of the Safavids to besiege Muslims in their own homes,” wrote cleric Saad al-Breik to his 1.15 million Twitter followers after the air strikes began last month.

Some material for this report came from Reuters.
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