Thanks to the ever-expanding conflict in the Middle East triggered by the war that Trump and Netanyahu launched against Iran, the news forces us to confront information about the geography and politics of the region.
As an example, we recently learned that the Houthis (or Ansar Allah to give them their formal name) had made a lightning advance along the coast of Yemen, ending up capturing various strategic locations such as the islands of Perim and the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands, giving them significant control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait that lies at the gateway to the Red Sea, a key artery for shipping in the Middle East.
So who are the Houthis and how have they been able to take over much of Yemen? Western media has painted this as a proxy war between two old rivals, the Houthis being backed by Iran, and the weak Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia. But Yohannes Woldemariam writes that this is a far too simplistic an account of a conflict that long predates any Iranian involvement and that the Houthis should be viewed more as a lately-created informal partner of Iran rather than a proxy.
To understand who [the Houthis] are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. The Iran Primer’s account of the movement’s origins traces this history well before Iranian military assistance became important.
…Yemen’s history also warns against reducing the conflict to an ancient Sunni and Shi’a confrontation. In 1962, republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt intervened on the republican side, eventually sending tens of thousands of soldiers, while Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Sunni.
Egypt found its involvement in Yemen costly and withdrew, and Hussein al Houthi from the northern Zaydi region was able to bring together “people who felt economically neglected, politically excluded and religiously marginalized”. From 2004-2010, the Yemeni government led by Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to forcibly suppress the movement but while Hussein al Houthi was killed, the movement survived.
But then there occurred a series of shifting alliances.
The most striking was [the Houthi’s] alliance with Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president whose government had fought six wars against them. After Saleh’s removal during the Arab uprisings, his networks within Yemen’s military and political establishment combined with Houthi fighters and helped create the conditions in which Sana’a fell in 2014. The alliance eventually collapsed, and Houthi forces killed Saleh in 2017. By then, however, the movement controlled the capital and much of northern Yemen and had gained access to significant military resources of the Yemeni state.
Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in March 2015 as Houthi and allied forces expanded south. The imbalance in conventional power was enormous. Riyadh possessed modern combat aircraft, sophisticated imported weapons, enormous financial resources and powerful international partners. Yet years of war did not eliminate the Houthis.
…It is only after this history that Iran properly moves toward the center of the story. Iranian military assistance grew as the Houthis themselves became stronger. Weapons, missile and drone technology, training, intelligence and technical expertise greatly expanded what they could do. Hezbollah also provided assistance.
The Houthi-Iran relationship seems to be a mutually beneficial one, not one in which Iran is calling the shots.
Without Iranian assistance, the Houthis would almost certainly possess considerably less sophisticated long range capabilities. But assistance, alignment and control are different things. Evidence of Iranian weapons, advisers or intelligence does not by itself answer the question of who makes Houthi political and military decisions.
A Brookings analysis devoted to the proxy question argues that the Houthis do not fit a rigorous definition of proxy because Tehran lacks control over their behavior. It points to occasions when Houthi decisions diverged from Iranian preferences. This does not diminish Iranian influence. It makes the degree of that influence something to investigate rather than assume.
The chronology is revealing. Iran encountered a movement rooted in a Yemeni religious tradition, hardened by six wars, possessing its own leadership and constituencies, capable of alliances with former enemies and eventually able to seize the capital. Iran did not create those foundations. It later helped transform the movement’s military capabilities.
You would think that the wealthy Saudi’s backed by the US would be too powerful for a militia but the US has declined recent requests from the Saudis for military assistance and it looks as if the Houthis are ascendent. There is no doubt that Iran is benefiting from the military gains of the Houthis, since the new uncertainty over control of the Red Sea puts considerable additional strain on shipping in the region.
There are lessons from Yemen that countries that think they are powerful often forget when they encounter smaller countries.
There is also an older history worth remembering. Egypt entered Yemen in the 1960s with overwhelming conventional superiority and became trapped in a costly war. Saudi Arabia entered another Yemeni war half a century later with vastly more sophisticated technology and discovered its own limitations. These were very different wars, but both warn against treating Yemen primarily as a stage on which stronger outside powers act.
…Calling the Houthis an Iranian proxy reverses the history because it begins with the relationship they developed with Tehran rather than with the Yemeni circumstances that produced them. It also encourages another leap, from Iranian support for the Houthis to Iranian control of territory the Houthis themselves hold. At Bab el Mandeb, that distinction is especially important. Iran has influence through a Yemeni movement, but Iran does not control the strait.
As Kareem Fahim writes, the US-Israel attack on Israel Iran was seen as a western imperialist attack and drew the Houthis and Iran closer together. The gains by the Houthis put a further squeeze on US options in the region.
Still, nothing in the war has seemed as startling or as consequential as their breakneck assault last week, which centered on the capture of Mokha, a major port city on the Red Sea, and Perim, a tiny island at the southern entrance to the waterway. Both locations put the Houthis within firing distance of any ships that attempt to traverse the narrow strait. The rebels now control Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline.
In the path of the offensive, opposing forces—primarily trained, equipped, and supported by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.—seemed to melt away. “The result is catastrophic,” Amr al-Bidh, a senior official with Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council, a separatist group that has clashed with the Houthis, told me. “It’s created all these alarms.” Not only had war returned to Yemen but uncertainty had fallen over the Red Sea, which has served as a reliable alternative route for oil shipments in the Persian Gulf since Iran began blockading the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the gulf, earlier this year. In March, Saudi Arabia, because of the shipping restrictions in the Persian Gulf, began transporting its crude oil through a pipeline that stretches from the kingdom’s Eastern Province to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, on its western coast. Fears that Iran and its close ally, the Houthis, effectively control two of the world’s most important maritime choke points rattled global energy markets. Then, last week, a drone attack that Saudi Arabia said was launched by Iran-backed militias inside Iraq hit the pipeline, causing a spike in the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil, a global benchmark in the oil markets.
The Houthis have taken pains to assure everyone who will listen that they are independent agents who are acting on behalf of their own interests and are not puppets of Iran.
Houthi officials tried to assuage fears about their intentions. Though they had previously announced a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, passage through the Red Sea remained “safe and orderly,” a Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdulsalam, said in a post on X on September 10th. The strait and the Red Sea faced “no danger” from the Yemeni side. But widely shared videos on social media showed that the rebels were also celebrating, hailing their offensive as a blow against foreign intervention and a strategic milestone that could tip the balance of Yemen’s once stalemated war. “The American-Saudi project aimed at regionalizing and fragmenting Yemen has been brought down,” a commentator wrote in Saba, a Houthi-run news agency. Control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait would serve “Yemeni national interests” and “Arab and Islamic national security.”
Given his difficulties with the war and the drop in oil supplies, Trump seems to have decided to dump his ally Saudi Arabia in return for assurances from the Houthis that they would not target US ships.
Still, days later, there was no evidence that the Saudis and the Houthis were de-escalating, or that the United States, the kingdom’s defense partner, would immediately provide direct military support. Axios had reported that the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had called Trump twice as the Houthis advanced, asking for U.S. air strikes against the rebels. Trump, who had signed what the White House called a “historic” defense agreement with the Saudis in November, 2025, declined.
Today comes reports that it looks like the Houthis have attacked Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia.
The whole situation is extremely volatile and complicated. The one thing that you can be sure of is that Trump and Hegseth are hopelessly out of their depth, given their contempt for expertise.
But not to worry! Trump is laser-focused on major issues like the Lincoln Pool and somehow getting his name on the Kennedy Center, while Hegseth wants to make sure that the soldiers who attend his speeches meet his height and weight requirements and are well-groomed and have the required amounts of of testosterone. The US might be bankrupting itself through this futile war and its military might be cracking at the seams because of of it but it would be terrible if the photos of the soldiers in Hegseth’s audiences did not look good.
I thought the most important question was whether the Houthis were Sunni or Shia because everyone knows the Middle East is all about those factions grasping for each others’ throats. But there you go again, complicating everything with your facts…
/s
Way back in the 20th century, Yemen was two nations: “South Yemen” and “North Yemen” (though on a map it seems they should have been called “East” and “West” respectively), for much of the time involved in what western media like to describe as “low-intensity conflict”.
USAnians rarely heard much about any of that, except when one side or the other took western hostages. I remember noting how this was the only theater of war in which America’s government, viewing the situation through a Cold War lens, favored the northern territorial division (as compared to Korea and Vietnam). The two united in 1990, and the capital city of North Yemen (Sana’a) become the capital of all Yemen.
The wealthy Houthi clan, which gave its name to the movement we know and love today (but did not retain full control), has its roots in the former North Yemen, but neither the wiki articles on NY and the Houthis, nor general media backgrounders, note the connection.
One article I read back in the bifurcated days went on at some length about how hostages held in North Yemen had it better than their counterparts anywhere else in the world, being treated as “guests” with much courtesy and comfort. That tradition does not seem to have lasted either.
Frankincense and myrrh are missing from this equation, as presented here. These trees live in and are native to these areas. This is *why* the Houthi are powerful and have money. The trees that we get these two precious resins from are endangered and are being bled to death. Nobody is planting any new ones. You can get analogues from India, yes. But the originals are about to be extirpated.
The fight is ultimately about who gets to do this ecological extermination.
can we get world peace now, so somebody can make awardbait television about these tales of drama and intrigue?
I assume “the US-Israel attack on Israel” should be “on Iran”?
[Thanks! I have corrected it. -Mano]
For some historical context -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaydism
This article lists all the mistakes made that allowed the Houthis to more or less walk into the Red Sea strait.
.1. The South Yemenis didn’t do much.
Their forces on the front were ghost battalions with 20% of the soldiers they supposedly had.
Their political leadership is also not effective.
.2. The Saudis didn’t do anything.
There were calls for air strikes all day and nothing happened.
The Saudis also kicked the UAE forces out and didn’t replace them with Saudis.
.3. The US didn’t do anything either.
It’s not clear whether we didn’t do anything because we didn’t want to or because we couldn’t.
It is quite likely the second alternative.
The US has lost 60 planes to Iranian attacks (most on the ground) and we haven’t replaced those losses.
So there it is.
The Yemenis, Saudis, and the USA didn’t do much of anything to oppose the Houthis and they more or less drove in and took over. This is one of the key straits in the world and no one was defending it.
Saudi has been at war with the Houthis for 11 years. They bomb a lot and destroy a lot but their ground forces are apparently as crappy as you can expect for a corrupt oil-drenched kingdom.
Ansar Allah and Iran might not be under a single leadership but they’d have to be dumber and more incompetent than Trump and Hegseth to throw away the advantages cooperation gives them.
Agreeing about how they handle the straits, or even the appearance that they’re working with each other, considerably increases the pull either one has.
Other powers will be looking for ways to get them out of sync on this. I couldn’t even guess at how likely that is to work.
I found this piece by Spencer Ackerman interesting: Fanute The Houthi Coup
A rather interesting interview with Alastair Crooke, British diplomat/Intelligence officer, with a great deal of experience in the Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNtNYetk4Kg.
I ives an interesting and rather different view of things.
jrkrideau @#11,
Thanks for that link. That was a fascinating interview, providing a whole new perspective on what is going on at the ground level instead of the usual bird’s eye view.
I will link to it in a future post so that more people will get to listen to it.