Houthi Gambling

The escalation in the Red Sea between the US-led international coalition and Yemen’s Houthis comes as no surprise. The Houthis have been there for a long time. They are called “rebels,” but they have occupied the capital Sanaa and northern Yemen for almost a decade: Iranian allies, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian Assad regime, and Iraqi Shiite militias. By threatening shipping from the Bab al-Mandab Strait to Suez, they are becoming the new “ideal enemy” of the USA and the West. And all this without having to talk to them, negotiate, and take into account their requests. We did not want a large-scale war in the Middle East, but we are contributing to yet another conflict without trying to avoid it.

Why did the Houthis invade the Red Sea? They have threatened to target ships heading to Israel and have also launched missile attacks on the Jewish port of Eilat, just as they targeted Saudi oil facilities in 2019. The lack of American response to the Wahhabi kingdom’s defense has been one of the main causes of friction between Washington and Riyadh, which has suffered a heavy defeat in the open war against the Houthis that began in 2015. A failure, given that to defeat the rebels, Riyadh and the Emirates hired tens of thousands of mercenaries, recruited as far away as Latin America.

In fact, while on the one hand, the Houthis today intend to attack ships heading to Jewish ports, on the other, perhaps the real reason is that they intend to keep Saudi Arabia and the international community under control. To demonstrate their military influence and gain international political recognition in the future, which has not yet been achieved.

But who are the Houthis? I think in December 2009 I was one of the first journalists to see them up close. The war against the regime of President Saleh, later killed by the Houthis themselves in 2017 while attempting to flee Sanaa, was already underway, and the Saudis were paying Yemeni soldiers and also supporting them with air power. This is how they looked to me then. There were about thirty of them, stationed on the road to Sada, the historic fortress of Ad Harf Surfian, against the backdrop of mountains with black sharp cliffs that are a prelude to the Saudi border. They showed retreating into the last pockets of resistance, pursued by soldiers and tribal militias loyal to the president. The spokesman said they would retake the city “very soon,” while “other guerrilla groups,” he said, “have been sent to the Jawf area to attack the Saudis on the border.”

The weakened and tired Houthis of Harf Surfian, however, bore no obvious signs of battle, as if they had still emerged unscathed from these sanctuaries of dark rocks, craters, and thousand-year-old fortifications that they knew well and where they used hit-and-run tactics. They had few weapons then. They had AK-47 assault rifles on their shoulders, colored bandoleers, and military pouches. But no heavy ammunition, just a few RPG launchers lying on the backs of Toyota pickups. Almost all of them wore checkered keffiyehs, framing the stern, weary faces of people who looked much older than they actually were. Among them were experienced fighters, as well as children aged 14-15 years and possibly younger.

According to many observers, the Houthis were already waging a kind of proxy war for Tehran. However – this is what prompted me to cross Yemen – nobody was interested in them back then. The Houthi problem is another serious underestimation of modern conflicts. The Houthis are part of the Zaydi minority and have also been manipulated to counter the rise of Saudi-backed Wahhabi preachers. Then, when they acquired enough power to make demands, they rebelled, gaining followers in the more traditionalist regions of the North, where even today they cannot stomach the 1962 revolution that overthrew the thousand-year-old Imamate. The Houthi family clan feels a sense of inheritance in some ways, claiming direct descent from Mohammed as Seyyeds (religious people who wear a black turban).

Thus, the local conflict, opened by the Houthis, has a religious, cultural, geopolitical, and territorial dimension. But from isolation several decades ago it has turned into an international crisis, linked to other regional problems and now ignited by the war in the Gaza Strip.

The uprising, which originated in the early 1990s, remains one of the key elements in the development of the situation in Yemen. The rebels represented the main enemy of government forces backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Tribal and regional in nature, the Houthi movement has long justified its uprising as a desire to end the marginalization of northwestern Yemen. Added to this is the defense of the religious minority they purport to represent, namely Zaydism, a movement often included within Shiism, but which some Islamologists say is closer to Sunniism, even to the point of making it a fifth legal and doctrinal branch. It was also a violent attack, often targeting civilians indiscriminately. And the Houthis have opposed the ruthless logic of retaliation by the Riyadh-led coalition, not hesitating to use child soldiers and resort to terror in order to silence every dissenting voice, including that of journalists, in the territories under their control.

What is the possible development of this conflict in the Red Sea? The Houthis are using Hamas’s war with Israel primarily to keep Saudi Arabia under control. The attacks in the Red Sea have indeed put Riyadh in an awkward position, as it negotiates a ceasefire with the Houthis. By getting closer to Iran through Chinese mediation (Passaran arms and trains the Houthis), the Saudis hoped to reach a compromise.

But now the logic of weapons prevails, and in the wake of the American attack, the Saudis, like many other countries in the region, fear a major and uncontrollable war.