Mideast: Who Are The Houthis And What Makes Their Recent Gains So Shocking?
With crucial towns, cities, islands, and maritime trade hubs captured since the start of September, the Yemeni Houthis have once again stepped out of regional focus and into a much larger, internationally consequential limelight. Less than three weeks after their offensive along the western coast of the Red Sea began, the Houthis now sit in a position to influence global shipping through their control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a pathway through which as much as 12% of the world’s trade has historically passed, putting officials from around the world on edge. But despite military responses from regional players, the question as to whether the gains made will be retaken by anti-Houthi forces remains unclear.
These recent developments have also raised questions for many who are not experts in Gulf and Middle Eastern politics; namely, who are the Houthis, what are they fighting for, and why are these recent gains not just consequential, but shocking?
The Houthis we know today are the result of significant organizational transformation since it was first established in the early 1990s. Originally known as the “Believing Youth,” the group that gave way to the Houthi organization was a cultural and educational group centered on Zaydi Shiism, a particular branch of Shia Islam that makes up roughly 35% of Yemen’s population according to US estimates. They sought to revive Zaydism, whose imams had ruled northern Yemen for roughly one thousand years prior to a 1962 revolution that toppled the imamate, after which Saudi-backed Salafi religious influence expanded across the country.
By the 1990s, with Salafism on the rise, the group considered itself a defender of their faith, traditions, culture, and communities in northern Yemen. But as it did for large swaths of the region, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the US-led War on Terror upended much of the established order.
The transition of the Houthis from a local, religion-oriented group to militant, war-hardened fighters accelerated in 2004 in part due to then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s cooperation with the United States in the War on Terror. The Houthis resisted, publicly challenging this position. Saleh responded by putting a $55,000 bounty on the head of their leader, Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, and sent the military to arrest him in June 2004.
The wars that followed between the Houthis and the central Yemeni government between 2004 and 2010 would succeed in killing al-Houthi but also incidentally succeed in both turning him into a martyr whose namesake the group adopted in tribute and transforming the group from merely a local and cultural defense organization to an increasingly powerful nationwide political and military force.
By the time Saudi Arabia entered the conflict after border incursions, the Houthis were a sophisticated insurgent group with significant militant capabilities and no longer merely rebels hiding in caves with rifles. Despite being fought tooth and nail by the well-resourced Yemeni and, later, Saudi Arabian governments and bearing the brunt of extensive military campaigns that caused widespread civilian suffering, the Houthis survived to capitalize on the Arab Spring that arose in 2011.
As thousands in Yemen took to the streets to demand Saleh’s ouster, the Houthis repositioned themselves, moving further away from narrow conceptions as defenders of the north and Zaydism towards presenting themselves as national protectors addressing the issues facing all Yemenis: corruption, widespread poverty, and fuel subsidy cuts.
By 2014, the Houthis had found themselves in a stunning position; when president Saleh was forced to step down in 2012 and a GCC-backed National Dialogue Conference proposed a division of Yemen that would leave Houthi-controlled territory with very little access to the country’s major oil and gas resources, they turned to Saleh, the very man that had killed their leader and launched brutal wars in an effort to crush them and whose own forced ouster made him amenable to cooperation. Utilizing the loyalty that significant elements of the Yemeni military still felt toward Saleh as well as his political networks, the Houthis took control of the capital city of Sanaa with relatively little military resistance. By 2015, the Houthis had dissolved parliament, taken control of the government, and caused then-President Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia.
What followed in the 11 years since upended everyone’s expectations. A Saudi-led anti-Houthi coalition of Arab states launched an offensive to reinstate the Hadi government, but while the Houthis had lost much of the territory they had seized in southern Yemen by late 2015, their hold on the north could not be shaken, turning the intervention into a protracted war colored by infighting and significant civilian suffering. As the anti-Houthi forces buckled amid significant internal fracturing, violence, blockades, infrastructure destruction, displacement, economic collapse, and other factors compounded one another and gave way to a devastating humanitarian crisis that still exists today.
Despite a fragile truce expiring after failing to be extended in October of 2022, the fractured country reached somewhat of a state of stasis, with frontlines and strongholds largely remaining frozen for several years. Along the western coast, the internationally-recognized Yemeni government and their coalition of support maintained what was seen as a secure grip on their crucial holdings along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden; this was despite the United Arab Emirates completing a years-long withdrawal of the vast majority of its troops from Yemen in January, leaving a power vacuum in their wake and giving way to escalating infighting between remaining anti-Houthi forces.
And yet, while the region was distracted with the Iranian-American conflict over the Strait of Hormuz in September, the Houthis managed to topple anti-Houthi holdings along the western coast that had remained largely stable for years in only a matter of days, taking control of areas crucial to maritime shipping and trade. This was an extraordinary turn of events, not only in the eyes of those fighting the Houthis, but across the international and regional communities.
Cities that were considered strongholds of anti-Houthi forces collapsed like a house of cards. The city of Mocha, well-equipped and well-funded, fell within a matter of hours. “Ghost soldier” corruption throughout anti-Houthi forces exposed an immense weakness and acted as a contributing factor to the Houthis’ victories, with some units reportedly composed of nearly 80% “ghost soldiers” — personnel listed on military rolls but absent from the battlefield — leaving bases and military sites vastly undermanned and vulnerable. The completion of the withdrawal of Emirati forces earlier in the year, who had been responsible for significant military supervision and logistical support, had introduced a fundamental weakness in the ability of anti-Houthi forces to strategically organize and communicate that the Houthis exploited with great success.
The vastly greater military resources available to Saudi Arabia and its partners should’ve also created a natural advantage against the Houthis, but it proved relatively insignificant in the Houthis’ September blitz, especially as they continued to receive Iranian weapons, training, and technical assistance. Now, expensive and advanced military equipment abandoned by retreating anti-Houthi forces has landed squarely in the hands of the group it was intended to defend against. And while only capturing coastal cities and towns would’ve been significant in its own right, the Houthis managed to also take control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait through the seizure of Perim and other key islands, upending the global shipping status quo.
With that, in a matter of days the Houthis did what many considered highly unlikely: they disrupted regional power dynamics, overran positions that had been defended and financed for years, as well as took control of a crucial shipping lane, managing it all with shockingly ineffective resistance in the face of the strategic exploitation of fractured enemies and a distracted region.
