Abdelmalik Al Huthi, the secretive leader of the Yemeni movement in the crosshairs of the United States

Just hours after the United States and the United Kingdom launched a flurry of airstrikes in the early hours of Friday against dozens of targets of Yemen's Houthi movement, in retaliation for their attacks in the Red Sea, the group declared that the action would not be unanswered. The rebels anticipated that this would be greater than those that have been recorded to date and that they would not stop their attacks against ships linked to Israel.

The person in charge of sending the message, in a speech on television in which he appeared dressed with a traditional dagger, was the leader of the movement, Abdelmalik Al Huthi, a hermetic figure who began to stand out as the military leader of a peripheral insurgency and who has ended transforming it into a ferocious group that controls a third of Yemen's territory, where 80% of the country's population lives, according to the US State Department. This insurgent organization is being able to disrupt navigation through the key artery of the maritime transport that runs off the western Yemeni coast, a route through which 12% of world trade transits that accesses the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

Al Huthi was born in the late 1970s or early 1980s – his specific age is unclear – in the northern Yemeni province of Saada, on the border with Saudi Arabia. His father, Badreddin, was a distinguished religious scholar of the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, whose adherents represent a majority in Saada but a minority of one-third of Yemen's population. His older brother, Hussein, emerged as a sharp critic of former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and was the co-founder of a small religious group, Believer Youth, whose objective was to defend Zaidi rights and interests. The movement, which became progressively militarized and politicized, ended up being known by the surname of its founding clan, Al Huthi, despite its formal name being Supporters of God.

Abdelmalik Al Huthi was promoted as the group's military leader after Hussein was killed in 2004 in a campaign of persecution by Yemeni military and security forces, suspicious of his political ambitions. During his time as military leader, he was considered a shrewd strategist, very knowledgeable of the terrain in Saada and a tough and valid commander capable of facing the attacks of the central government. After the death of his father in 2010, he also assumed the political leadership of the movement.

Under his leadership, and during the Arab uprisings of 2011, the group carried out a profound political transformation by abandoning a discourse and agenda focused on the Zaydi issue to embrace an ideology and a more national narrative, which appealed to a broader popular base. wide. It is also considered that, at that time, Al Huthi's youth was a factor that allowed the movement and its leader to gain more followers.

Since his rise to the top of the formation, the Yemeni leader has been characterized by being extremely cautious with his security: he does not grant interviews to the media, he barely appears in public, and he does not meet in person with foreign officials. It is believed that, to a large extent, his reserve and discretion are due to the recurring attacks that members of his family have suffered. In fact, he himself was presumed dead in 2009 after an airstrike, before reappearing on camera—dagger at his waist included—to deny it.

Iron fist

Under his leadership, the military wing of the Houthi movement has transformed from a restless insurgency in northern Yemen to an armed group with the capacity to threaten shipping through the Suez Canal. Today it controls with an iron fist the large population centers of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, and almost the entire Red Sea coast, and has tens of thousands of troops, combat experience, naval capacity and an important arsenal, in part provided by Iran, according to the UN.

Throughout almost the entire last decade, the rebels have been able to resist and prevail against the blows of a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which decided to intervene in Yemen, directly and through related groups, to defeat the movement after it occupied Sanaa in 2015 and ousted then-President Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi, an ally of Riyadh. The war has killed more than 375,000 people, due to direct or indirect causes such as hunger, according to the UN, and has devastated and divided the country, where the Houthis remain in a position of dominance from which they have been able to attack even Saudi Arabia. and Emirates.

In early 2021, the United States Department of State declared the Houthis a terrorist organization, and included their leader, along with two other leaders, on its list of global terrorists. President Joe Biden's Administration revoked the movement's inclusion on the list after a month, but not that of Al Huthi.

In recent months, Riyadh has been negotiating its exit from the Yemeni hornet's nest, in a process approved by Al Huthi, who is considered a figure with a certain pragmatism and predisposition to reach certain political understandings. Saudi Arabia was, in fact, one of the first countries to react to the first attack by the United States and the United Kingdom in Yemen, rushing to call for “an escalation” to be avoided. Riyadh is also not participating in the international naval coalition announced by Washington in mid-December to patrol the southern Red Sea.

The Palestinian issue has an important weight for the Yemeni movement, and in the past Al Huthi himself had opened the door in some speech to join his allies in Palestine – Hamas – and Lebanon – the Shiite militia party Hezbollah – in a future war against Israel. On October 10, three days after the Israeli army began its military operation in Gaza, the leader of the Yemeni insurgency already announced that he would not hesitate to respond to a US intervention.

At first, the Houthis chose to launch multiple missiles in the direction of Israel, which is more than 1,500 kilometers away. However, most were intercepted before even arriving, and some artifacts fell into Egypt. It was then that the group, taking advantage of Yemen's strategic geographic location, decided to turn its attention to navigation through the southern Red Sea; first, to merchants supposedly linked to Israel and then, to anyone who navigated those waters. Their actions, which they say they will stop when the aggression in Gaza stops and humanitarian aid access is allowed, are having strong repercussions for maritime transport.

The new regional scenario, and the ability to extract political benefits from the situation in Palestine and the confrontation with Western powers, is believed to also offer internal respite for Al Huthi. In recent months, the leader was having to face growing social unrest due, above all, to the poor economic situation in the territories controlled by his group, which, despite having partial access to state coffers and sources of income, like taxes, you are approaching bankruptcy.

The movement also receives financial aid from Iran, which is its main ally abroad, although the extent of the relationship between the two and the influence that Tehran exercises over the Houthis remains unknown. In early December, and in response to their attacks in the southern Red Sea, the United States Treasury sanctioned 13 individuals and entities that it accused of remitting to the rebels the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars from the sale of Iranian commodities. And at the end of the same month, three other entities and one person were also sanctioned for allegedly facilita
ting the transfer of millions of dollars of Iranian funds to companies affiliated with the Houthis.

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