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?

To be sure, neither the Huthis nor their enemies expected the nightmare of the Gaza genocide starting in October 2023 to be still continuing close to a year later, with no prospect of an end in sight. All previous Israeli wars lasted for days or weeks, at most months — one of many reasons why regional and world powers were largely able to ignore those wars and the injustices to which Palestinians have been subjected for more than seventy years.

This time, things are different. To popular despair and official shame, most Global North states are explicitly supporting Israel diplomatically and politically as well as selling it arms and ammunition. For their part, Yemen’s regional neighbors make vacuous statements and hold meetings in luxurious settings calling for peace, yet quietly continue to support Israel by trucking supplies from Gulf ports unaffected by the Red Sea war.

Through their attacks on Red Sea shipping, the Huthis have gained international status among the millions of people throughout the world who are shocked at the ongoing massacre of Palestinians and the failure of world leaders, including those of the United Nations, to end it. A widespread expectation that the war would soon expand to the West Bank and Lebanon ignored the determination of leaders there and beyond to avoid confronting Israel and the United States, though Israeli provocations may soon be irresistible.

By contrast, the Huthis, based in Yemen, two thousand kilometers away from the heart of the Palestine-Israel conflict and with no shared borders, have taken military action that has had a significant impact on the region even if it is limited in terms of actual strikes on Israel. No one expected Ansar Allah to be responsible for the major military intervention in support of the Palestinians. The group’s standing as an important member of the “axis of resistance” is now assured, in addition to the world attention they are receiving.

The Home Front

The Huthi movement started as a small militant organization in the 1990s in Yemen’s far northwest. The Saleh regime’s divide-and-rule approach to governing meant that the Shi’a Zaydi Ansar Allah found itself in competition with rival Sunni Salafi movements in its heartland. This was a decade during which one of its leaders, Hussain al Huthi, even served as a member of Yemen’s parliament from 1993 to 1997.

As the Huthis were less than fully compliant with the ruling regime’s strategies, the relationship deteriorated, leading to the first armed conflict in 2004, followed by another five Huthi “wars” by 2010. Each one strengthened the Huthis, giving them more military experience and expanding the territory under their control. The divisive tactics of the Saleh regime alienated large sections of society in the contested zones, which also contributed to the expansion of Huthi control. But the group’s improved strategic skills were fundamental to their increased influence in northern Yemen.

Participation, albeit as a separate entity, in the 2011 uprisings against Saleh’s rule broadened their support beyond the far north. In the following three years, they did not participate in the “transitional” government established by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) agreement of November 2011. This abstention improved their image nationally given the discredit and inefficiency of this government, alongside its failure to address any of the country’s major problems.

However, the Huthis did participate in the National Dialogue Conference of 2013–14. The committee specifically designed to address the euphemistically named “Saada problem,” in reference to Ansar Allah’s regional stronghold, failed to find a solution.

During this period, the Huthis increased their control over wider areas and developed an initially secret alliance with Saleh, who had been pressured to stand down as president in February 2012. Military expansion and political action culminated in their takeover of Sana’a in September 2014. This led to the collapse of the transitional government and open warfare from early 2015.

Holding Onto Power

Internationalization of the war began with the intervention of the Saudi-led coalition on March 26, 2015. We can see this as the first full-scale engagement of the Huthis against foreign forces, although there had previously been clashes with the Saudis in 2009, which the Huthis decisively won, on the margins of their conflict with the Saleh regime.

From 2015 onward, the Huthis asserted that their fight was one of national resistance against foreign aggression by the Saudis and their GCC allies with US weapons and technical support. This theme became the main argument they used to garner popular support and to recruit fighters and was repeated regularly until the April 2022 UN-mediated truce.

Since 2015, the Huthis have controlled the country’s capital and the headquarters of most ministries and other major national institutions. Two-thirds of the country’s population and about one-third of its territory are under their rule. Changes in the front lines during that period have been minor, with the exception of about a hundred kilometers of the Tihama coast south of Hodeida. The Huthis took over this area in 2021 when their opponents controlling it moved east to confront a Huthi offensive on Marib.

Despite the extent of their authority, the Huthis are still officially described as a nonstate actor. This is regardless of the fact that senior officials from the rival internationally recognized government (IRG) are dispersed between the official “temporary” capital of Aden and various locations outside Yemen altogether, in particular Saudi Arabia.

Needless to say, Ansar Allah considers itself to be the official representative of the Yemeni state and its government to be the country’s official government. The United Nations and other organizations nowadays still retain their main offices in Sana’a but have increased their presence in Aden. Most embassies have decamped to Saudi Arabia, with only Iran maintaining a full embassy in Sana’a and Russia keeping its consulate open.

Huthi rule is uncompromisingly fundamentalist, giving no room for freedom of expression and imposing severe restrictions on women’s rights. Comparison with the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan is not entirely misplaced. All institutions are either managed directly by Huthi militants or subject to Ansar Allah “supervisors” at all levels — these are individuals who basically dictate decisions and procedures to the nominal officials.

Imprisonment and torture are routine responses to any hint of dissent. In June 2024, Ansar Allah arrested a number of UN staff, as well as about sixty staff of international humanitarian organizations, both male and female, holding them incommunicado.

Since then, they have produced a series of “confessions of the Israeli-American spies” which would be laughable if the situation were not so serious. In a recent example, detainees have “admitted” that the United States provided scholarships for study abroad, offered experts to develop curricula, and financed “preparing a strategy for higher education and conducted a study to establish an academic accreditation center.”

Peace and War

In 2022, the Saudi regime’s determination to remove the Yemeni war from its current agenda led to direct negotiations with the Huthis. Those talks were close to reaching a final agreement when the Israeli war on Gaza started in October 2023. The agreement would formally have been one between Ansar Allah and the IRG, with Saudi Arabia depicted as a mediator, thus liberating the latter country from possible accusations of war crimes during the seven years of air strikes Saudi forces have carried out on Yemen.

The UN special envoy would then have been left with the unenviable task of transforming this agreement into some kind of sustainable peace deal between the Huthis and the IRG, in a context with a vastly strengthened Ansar Allah and a comparably weakened IRG. Although the discussions did continue at a slower pace thereafter, the task of finalizing the agreement became increasingly difficult as the war persisted and direct Huthi involvement against Israel fundamentally affected the overall geopolitical situation.

Throughout this period, the Huthis acted alone against the IRG and its international supporters. Although they received some support from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the form of technical advice, training, fuel supplies, and advanced technology, only Iranian diplomatic support was publicly acknowledged. The Iranian-linked “axis of resistance” simply did not feature in the Huthi war within Yemen, nor did Israel, beyond repetition of the movement’s basic slogan and occasional hostile statements.

Support for Palestinians, or violent opposition to Israel, is part of the very fabric of Ansar Allah. Of the five phrases that comprise the slogan that defines its basic outlook, two are “Death to Israel” and “Curse on the Jews.” Until recently, however, this slogan was largely devoid of substance.

Since last October, the Huthis have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to take action against Israel and the United States. Huthi leaders regularly insist upon their determination to attack Israel by whatever means available to them until the Gaza war ends, usually at the enormous pro-Palestinian demonstrations held in Sana’a on Fridays.

As early as late October, they had launched some missiles targeting southern Israel, which was the maximum range for their weapons at the time. Although these projectiles failed to cause serious damage, the outcome of reduced maritime traffic in the region eventually bankrupted Eilat port, a meaningful blow to the Israeli economy.

As the Israelis reinforced their air defenses southward, Huthi missiles failed to reach significant targets, and the movement refocused its tactics toward effective action against the Red Sea–Suez Canal trade route. Starting in November 2023, they attacked ships in the Red Sea that had any connection with Israel, whether that took the form of ownership, operating agreements, or a destination at Israeli ports.

On November 19, the Huthis successfully captured a part-Israeli-owned ship, the Galaxy Leader, the only such case to date. They still hold the ship and its crew, with the former having become a tourist destination for Yemeni men, while the crew are being detained elsewhere. Negotiations for their release are making no progress as Ansar Allah insists that an end to the war in Gaza is a precondition.

Raising the Cost

Since then, attacks on ships in the Red and Arabian Seas have had a considerable impact on this major route for international maritime trade. By the end of July 2024, they had hit eighty ships, sinking two and severely damaging a few others. Earlier this month, one oil tanker containing more than a million barrels of oil was hit and caught fire. Efforts to salvage it finally succeeded this week.

Attacks are continuing on a regular basis despite the efforts of multinational naval efforts to prevent them. The majority of these drones, missiles, and other projectiles are downed by US, UK, EU, and other naval forces in the Red Sea. Yet as US officials have pointed out, the Huthis only have to be lucky once.

The main impact of Huthi operations has been on traffic in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, which has reduced substantially. The tonnage transiting the canal dropped from 1.5 to one billion tons in the fiscal year 2023–24, and the number of ships is down by a fifth, while revenues for the canal company dropped from US$9.4 billion to US$7.2 billion in the same period. For world trade, a detour around the Cape of Good Hope extends the travel time by about ten days. It also increases operational costs, as well as reducing cargo availability over time, thus causing minor inconvenience, mainly to European consumers.

The response of the states that support Israel has been a series of naval operations in the region that are supposed to make passage safe for commercial navigation. Since January, the United States and Britain have been carrying out Operation Poseidon Archer, which involves attacks on the Yemeni mainland, targeting launching sites and other facilities. According to the Yemen Data Project, there had been 245 strikes under the rubric of Poseidon Archer by the end of August 2024 using 523 munitions and causing seventy-four civilian casualties.

This follows the earlier Operation Prosperity Guardian, which involved a number of states (though none of those bordering the Red Sea), and the EU’s Operation ASPIDES, which only operates at sea. In spite of this panoply of naval forces with massive capacity, Huthi operations have continued unabated, and ships are regularly hit.

Meanwhile, the US involvement in the war has been described by one former navy commander, Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, as

the most sustained combat that the US Navy has seen since World War II. . . . We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the US can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage.

US strategy is not working, and the financial cost is enormous by comparison with the expenditure of the Huthis, whose drones and missiles cost between $2,000 and $10,000 each, while the US ones cost at least $2 million each. The aircraft carrier deployed in the area has running costs of $8 million dollars per day.

On July 19, a Huthi missile actually struck a building in Tel Aviv, killing one and wounding ten people. Israeli retaliation caused major damage to Hodeida port, in particular destroying 150,000 tons of fuel (leaving only 50,000 tons of fuel storage) as well as destroying the cranes that are essential for unloading ships. Unsurprisingly, the Israeli attacks have shown no consideration for the impact on Yemeni civilians. Another Huthi missile struck central Israel on September 15, thus demonstrating that such strikes are likely to become a more regular occurrence, despite what is expected to be savage Israeli retaliation.

Ansar Allah’s relations with the “axis of resistance” have mainly involved coordination and exchanges of views. But in June and July this year, the Huthis claimed to have carried out joint operations with Iraq’s Islamic Resistance group against Haifa and Eilat ports. There is little doubt that such cooperation will increase with the intensification and worsening of the regional crisis, unless something is done to hold back and end the Israeli genocide.