As Rishi Sunak prepares to address MPs, Grant Shapps says UK has no interest in wider Yemen conflict
The UK has no interest in taking part in any wider conflict in Yemen but is “waiting to see what happens” before deciding whether further military strikes against Houthi forces might be needed, the defence secretary has said.
Discussing the US-led strikes on the Yemen-based rebels in the early hours of Friday, which were aimed at stopping Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, Grant Shapps said the aims of the military operation were always limited.
“We’ve always been clear with our intention is not to go into Yemen or anything like that, but simply to send a very clear and, I hope, unambiguous message to the Iranian-backed Houthis is that their behaviour in the Red Sea was completely unacceptable,’” he told Sky News on Monday.
Asked if further strikes were possible, Shapps told BBC1’s Breakfast: “Guaranteeing that freedom of navigation is incredibly important. So we’ve said that this is a discrete action. Of course, if the Houthis don’t stop we have to look at this again.”
Shapps, who was scheduled to give a broader speech on the security threats facing the world later on Monday, accepted that the strikes so far would have only damaged some of the Houthis’ military capabilities.
“We never thought that this would remove all of their facilities,” he told Sky. “That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to send that very clear message.”
Rishi Sunak is due to address parliament about the attacks on Monday afternoon, the first chance MPs will have had to have a say on the military action.
Shapps told the BBC that briefing parliament before the strikes would not have been practical: “One of the issues with having a sort of full debate about those things upfront is it would have provided perhaps too much information in detail to the Houthis.
“So we needed to act. In fact, we did that with quite a lot of consultation – with parliament, with the Speaker, the leader of the opposition, and others. And of course, there’ll be time today to have that public discussion in parliament as well.”
While the Houthis have said their attacks on shipping are simply aimed at Israel following its attack on Gaza in response to the 7 October massacres by Hamas, Shapps dismissed this idea.
“I know the Houtis are saying that it’s somehow connected, but actually, 50 different nations have had their ships attacked, so it quite clearly isn’t actually connected,” he told the BBC.
In a seeming sign that the rebels intend to carry on attacking ships, the US military said on Sunday night that US fighter aircraft had shot down an anti-ship cruise missile fired from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen at one of its warships in the Red Sea.
The missile was fired towards the USS Laboon, which was operating in the Southern Red Sea, US Central Command said in a statement, in what appears to be the first such attempt on a US destroyer. No injuries or damage were reported.
Source: UK ‘will wait and see’ before deciding on further Houthi strikes | Foreign policy | The Guardian