Explainer: The Houthis

PHOTO CAPTION: Houthi supporters hold up their weapons during a demonstration against the United States decision to designate the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organisation, in Sanaa, Yemen January 20, 2021. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

BY GABRIEL FANELLI

Attacks on ships in the Red Sea have placed the Houthis at the forefront of a Middle Eastern political landscape that is increasingly volatile and complex. The region has turned into a coliseum for Great Power and Great Power adjacent nations and their proxies to flesh out their conflicts without spilling blood on their own soil. If you take the headlines at face value, the Houthis appear to be punching well above their weight for a group with no formal military to speak of, despite claims of over 100,000 fighters. They’ve even been nabbed cutting undersea cables, of which 90 percent of all Europe-Asia capacity runs through. Their regional allies of Iran and Hezbollah supply the materiel for their maritime warfare. There are two rarely used monikers for the Red Sea, known as the Gate of Grief and the Gate of Tears. The Houthis are making this a reality.

The group has been an active participant in Yemeni politics since their creation in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2014 when they took over Sana’a that Saudi Arabia decided they could no longer exist, which drug the United States – by proxy – into the protracted conflict that exists today. A prime example of this multi-layered conflict occurred in 2017 when a ballistic missile was launched from Yemen at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jabari said it was “an Iranian missile, launched by Hezbollah, from a territory occupied by the Houthis in Yemen.” In contrast, Saudi warplanes drop bombs with U.S. serial numbers stamped on their side. This is proxy war at its finest.

The Houthis belong to the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam. Plainly speaking, Shia Islam includes all of those who chose to follow Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib after the death of Muhammad instead of Abu Bakr, who the Sunni Muslims see as the second in succession and not Ali. Ali is considered the first Shia Imam. The three main sects of Shia Islam are divided up by the number of Imams you believe there have been since Ali. Zaydis believe in five imams and are often called “Fivers” because of it. Zaydism and its 1990s revival were in direct response to the growing Wahhabi influence from Saudi Arabia. The extremes of Shia and Sunni Islam are at war with one another, and according to both sides, the very heart and future of Islam is at stake.

Since the end of the Zaydi Mutawakkilite Kingdom in 1962 and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic there have been major tensions between the Shia remnants of the Kingdom and the government in Sanaa. This fight was taken up by the Houthis since 2004 and after ten years of fighting they took over the capital in Sanaa. The main drive was their assertion that then President Ali Abdullah Saleh – a Zaydi Shia Muslim, was siding with Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and marginalizing the Shia in the country. To their credit, Saleh played both sides to suit whatever his interests were. He paid dearly when he was assassinated in 2017. He was fleeing his home in search of Saudi protection in the Yemeni city of Marib. His vehicle was hit by an RPG, and as he crawled away from the wreckage, a Houthi sniper shot him in the head.

As violent as the headlines show the Houthis to be today, they began with peaceful roots under the banner of a group called The Believing Youth. There is discrepancy whether either of the brothers Mohammed and Hussein al-Houthi had official hands in starting the group, but in my estimation Hussein al-Houthi’s role as a prominent religious figure and member of Yemen’s Parliament under the Party of Truth clearly show associations to the country’s largest Zaydi religious bloc. Their goal was a Zaydi religious revival and they established religious “summer camps” with prominent religious scholars attending or contributing to the distributed materials. One of these scholars was Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah. It is here the group postured away from their inward jihad and sought armed insurrection as a means to their religious ends.

The radicalization of the movement, which still was not called “The Houthi Movement” began in 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Houssein al-Houthi began chanting anti-American and Jewish slogans from the al-Saleh Mosque after prayers. Ali Abdullah Saleh feared the “death to America” chants would soon turn to “death to al-Saleh” and began rounding up who he believed to be the culprit in 2004 – 800 Believing Youth members. Saleh invited Hussein to the capital to discuss minimizing tensions, but he declined. Now known as the Houthi Insurgency, Hussein launched a full-scale war against Saleh and the government. He was killed by Saleh’s forces just a few months after the insurgency began and it was then that the existing Zaydi movement renamed itself after Houssein al-Houthi. After his death, the movement was headed by his brother, Abdul Malik al-Houthi who also goes by Abu Jibril.

Over the next 10 years, the Houthis pushed on to Sana’a, displacing a quarter of a million in the process. The insurgency turned into a civil war in 2015 when the Saudis launched a massive air campaign to defend the Saudi sympathetic government in exile. In February 2015 the United States Embassy closed its doors, and the Ambassador relocated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the establishment of the Yemen Affairs Unit that still engages with the government of current president Rashad al-Alimi.

On June 10th Houthi rebels detained 11 workers from a U.N. Human rights agency. According to the Houthis, these individuals were members of an American-Israeli spy network. They claimed that when the U.S. closed its embassy in 2015 that they continued to operate a shadow network of spies under the guise of the U.N. They released a video where ten Yemenis alleged they had been recruited by Americans from the U.S. Embassy to spy on Houthi networks. This act seeks to legitimize their existence, hedging against what they consider an existential threat from the west, but also causes human rights organizations to pause their operations in an area that now has the sixth largest internal displacement of anywhere in the world. 4.5 million have been displaced, and another 22 million are in dire need of basic humanitarian aid. The naval blockades in the Gate of Tears will continue to hamper any prospects of delivering life saving care to these people.

The Treasury Department maintains intense pressure on the illicit shipping and finance network that supplies the Houthis, but whatever progress is made is backfilled by Iranian and Hezbollah funding. The greatest chance of success the United States could have in this conflict would be to control larger swaths of Somalia and utilize its neighboring territorial waters to fight the Houthis, but Turkey is currently outpacing our efforts to woo the former failed state and shows no signs of joining the growing international causes of Houthi condemnation.