Yemen’s Houthis Have Now Held Power for a Decade
Ten years ago today, the Ansar Allah movement, known as the Houthis, took power in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The group’s response to the Israeli attack on Gaza over the last 12 months has brought it global attention while peace talks in Yemen stall.
Houthi loyalists lift flags of Yemen and Palestine while taking part in an armed parade on December 20, 2023, in the Amran governorate, Yemen. (Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images)
Ten years ago today, on September 21, 2014, the movement widely known as the Huthis — officially titled Ansar Allah — took over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. Millions of Yemenis have now lived under their iron-fisted and uncompromisingly fundamentalist rule for a decade. Children who grew up during that period have known nothing else, while adults may remember the previous decade of increasing tension, worsening poverty, and political instability in the agony of the thirty-year-old regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh.
By September 2014, the Huthis had just managed to reach Sana’a, largely thanks to support from the former president Saleh, and were an unfamiliar force for political actors outside Yemen. Today they are attracting worldwide attention due to their maritime attacks in the Red Sea and beyond.
The Road to Power
It is now thirty-two years since Ansar Allah’s original “Believing Youth” movement was created, while the first war pitting the Huthis against the Saleh regime started two decades ago. How did a small, sectarian, marginalized youth group become an organization whose drones and missiles the US Navy has proved unable to defeat? How did Ansar Allah come to dominate Yemeni politics, and what are the prospects for Yemenis in the coming decade?
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