They are inspired by the Lebanese Hezbollah, they have been fighting against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for ten years, they are Iran's iron allies and they challenge Israel to put an end to the war in Gaza: the Houthi rebels, bombed by the USA and the United Kingdom, they control the north and west of Yemen.
Why are they called Houthis?
Officially the movement is called “Ansar Allah”, literally “The Defenders of God”, but the name by which everyone knows them comes from their historical leader Hussein Badr-al-Din al-Houthi who founded “al-Shabab al Mumin in 1992 ”, the “Young Believers”, in the governorate of Sa'da, in the north of the Arab country with a Shiite majority.
The Houthi consensus in fact finds its roots in the Shiite minority (about 35% of the Yemeni population) which refers to the Zaydist Koranic school, whose reference is Zayd ibn 'Ali ibn al-Husayn, son of the fourth Shiite imam who died in 8th century AD (a very different vision of Shiism compared to the Iranian version, attributable to the Jafarist school).
But here historical, religious and tribal reasons are intertwined with politics. The Zaydist-inspired theocratic Mutawakkilite monarchy controlled North Yemen between the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the early 1960s when an Egyptian-backed military coup overthrew the regime, also moving the capital from Taiz to Sana'a.
It was the beginning of a war civil war lasting five years (1962-1967) in which, also with the help of the Soviet Union, the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) supported the coup plotters, while Jordan and Saudi Arabia sided with the monarchy. In the end the Arab nationalists prevailed, the royal family left the country and the Gulf kingdoms recognized the new state.
Meanwhile, in 1978, with another series of coups, Zaydi general Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power and would govern for the next 33 years, also unifying Yemen in 1990 when the Northern Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of the South accepted reconciliation, bringing Sunni elites increasingly into power.
The roots of the Houthi movement
In the early 1990s, the “Young Believers” controlled a network of schools, youth camps and social welfare institutions, offering an alternative to the increasingly Wahhabi-inspired Sunni movements linked to Saleh's ruling party and drawing on to the religious vision prevailing in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
Their social work was so popular that the Sana'a authorities even decided to finance it, at least until the end of the 1990s. However, their growing popularity and increasingly harsh criticism aimed first at the corrupt regime
of Saleh and then to the war on terrorism unleashed by the USA after September 11, 2001 and Israel's repressive policies against the Palestinians brought the movement into conflict with the government.
In 2003, with the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies, the Houthis proclaimed a series of street demonstrations during Friday prayers, chanting slogans against America and Israel which created the basis of a clash with the country's pro-US government. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The Houthis, in fact, already had the government in the sights of their political action, not only because it was pro-American, but because it was considered corrupt and responsible for the marginalization of the Shiites and Zaydis in the areas of northern Yemen.
The following year Saleh unleashed the first bloody campaign of repression against the movement by the pro-Western government, arresting hundreds of Houthi followers and ordering the arrest of their historic leader Hussein al-Houthi, who had refused to meet the president and that he will eventually be killed.
Since then, Ansar Allah, led by Hussein's brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, began to arm itself and foment revolts in the north of the country, increasingly inspired by the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah.
Tensions continued throughout the first decade of the 2000s until in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring, Ansar Allah supported the popular uprising against Saleh's regime, aiming for greater autonomy for the Shiite-majority regions.
The war in Yemen and Gaza
But the failure of the national dialogue wanted by the new president (and Saleh's deputy) Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi led the Houthis to ally themselves again with the army loyal to Saleh, with whom they took power in the capital Sana'a in September 2014, after having brought thousands of people to the streets to protest against the cut in fuel subsidies. With an offensive that lasted a few months, between January and February 2015, they managed to reach Aden.
Since then, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has supported the internationally recognized government of Hadi, who took refuge first in Aden and then increasingly in the territories of Riyadh, and since 2022 his successor Rashad al-Alimi, who presides over the national unity government led by the Presidential Governing Council.
The war, with mixed success for the contenders, has in fact been at a stalemate for years with the Houthis firmly controlling the north and west of the country and the legitimate authorities, assisted by the Arab coalition, governing the rest of Yemen , also tormented by the jihadist terrorism of various groups that refer to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Meanwhile, Ansar Allah has moved ever closer to Iran, which offers the Houthis cheap oil, international political protection, training and military technology. Thus the Yemeni rebels, who killed former ally and President Saleh in a violent power struggle in 2017, have developed new missiles and drones capable of hitting oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and even threatening Israel.
Some fragile truces and the rapprochement mediated in 2023 by China between Saudi Arabia and Iran had given the international community hope in the possibility of finally achieving peace in Yemen but the war in Gaza has called everything into question.
After the start of the Israeli offensive on the Strip, the Houthis began to launch rockets against Israel and to threaten ships transiting the Red Sea bound for the ports of the Jewish State or attributable to countries allied with Tel Aviv to force the Netanyahu government to stop the raids on Gaza, while in response the USA and the United Kingdom began to bomb Yemen controlled by Ansar Allah “to guarantee free navigation” in the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, fundamental for the world economy and which many Western companies have already started to avoid.
In all of this, almost 10 years of war in Yemen have caused at least 377 thousand deaths, 4 million displaced people and 3 million refugees abroad while according to the United Nations, over 21.6 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian assistance. A tragedy that seems to never end and that the recent bloody developments in the Middle East risk only worsening.
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