America secretly deployed ground troops to the Yemen border last year

U.S. army
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Last December, about a dozen U.S. Army Green Berets were deployed to Saudi Arabia's border with Yemen, a previously unreported "escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters who are deep in Yemen," The New York Times reports.

Yemen has been embroiled in civil war since 2014, when the Houthi rebels — Shiite Muslims who are aligned with Iran — overthrew President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, an American counterterrorism ally. Saudi Arabia, another regional ally of the U.S. and a Sunni-majority country, led a military coalition that began bombing the Houthis in 2015; the rebels responded by firing missiles at Riyadh and other cities in the kingdom. "Yet there is no evidence that the Houthis directly threaten the United States," the Times adds, calling the rebels "an unsophisticated militant group with no operations outside Yemen." The organization has not even been classified as a terrorist group by America, making the escalation of U.S. special forces on the border noteworthy.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.