The Houthis vs Saudi Arabia | The new lords of the Red Sea

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Members of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces fire a tank during what they say to be clashes with Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis in a location given as near Al-Hazm, Yemen. File | Photo Credit: Reuters

On July 13, an Iranian civilian aircraft carrying a high-level Houthi delegation was heading towards Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. Under an unwritten understanding between the Houthis (or Ansar Allah), who control northern and northwestern Yemen, including Sana’a, and the country’s Saudi-backed government, planes seeking to land in Houthi-held territory were required to obtain prior approval. The Houthi delegation had left Yemen on July 3 on another Iranian aircraft to attend the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader who was assassinated by the U.S. and Israel on February 28 when they launched their war against Tehran.

Yemen’s Saudi-backed government had protested the Iranian plane transporting Houthi leaders, arguing it was a violation of Yemen’s sovereignty. It also opposed the delegation taking an Iranian plane back home, and instead offered to facilitate their return on a non-Iranian airline. The government’s main concern was that the flight could also be used to transport personnel of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and military equipment to Yemen. The Houthis, nevertheless, chose to return on a Mahan Air flight. To prevent the aircraft from landing, Saudi-backed forces bombed the runway of Sana’a airport, forcing the plane to land in Hodeidah. This was the trigger.

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The Houthis, who took control of Sana’a in 2014, said the strike was a violation of a 2022 ceasefire. They responded by bombing Saudi energy infrastructure and launching an offensive in Hodeidah and Taiz governorates. They also imposed a naval blockade on Saudi vessels in the Red Sea. Within two months, the Houthis made dramatic territorial gains, seizing the entire Red Sea coastline of Yemen and taking the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow chokepoint connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, under their control.

The roots of the Houthi movement can be traced to ‘Believing Youth’ (Muntada al-Shahab Al-Mu’min), a Zaydi revivalist group founded in Northern Yemen in the early 1990s. Hussein al-Houthi and his father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, influential Zaydi clerics in northern Yemen, became the movement’s leading figures. Inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the 1980s, Badr al-Din and his sons started building vast social and religious networks among the Zaydi Shias of Yemen, who make up roughly one-third of the Sunni-majority country’s population. While the Zaydis are seen as part of the Shia branch of Islam, both in terms of theology and practice, they are different from the ‘Twelver’ Shias of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

In 2004, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government, upset with the growing popularity and rebellion of the Houthis, issued an arrest warrant against Hussein.