Who are the Houthis?

The worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the United Nations (UN), and also the most forgotten. Human rights groups estimate that 56,000 people have been killed, including civilians and military, and 28 million - half the population - need urgent humanitarian aid. This is the situation in Yemen, a country located in the Arabian Peninsula, which since 2014 has suffered a bloody civil conflict that has devastated the already devastated nation.

The country has become a satellite war between different factions in the region. On the one hand, the coalition led by Saudi Arabia, also known as the Arab Coalition, which supports the faction of former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, against the Houthi front, linked to Iran. Some analysts have seen this conflict between Al-Hadi's supporters and the militia as a power struggle between Saudis and Iranians with the United States supporting the insurgents in Riyadh and Moscow.
 

To put this war into context, it is necessary to know who the Houthis are and what motivated them to take up arms against the Yemeni government. Better known as the Houthi militia, in honor of its first leader, they are a group that, according to a 2019 report by Renard Manson and Peter Salisbury, is composed of between 180,000 and 200,000 men, rebels known as Ansar Allah ("God's supporters"). 

The militia is attached to the branch of Shiite Islam known as Zaidism, which originated in the revolution of the Umayyad Caliphate in the eighth century. One third of the Yemeni population is Zaidi and they governed northern Yemen for a thousand years until 1962, when a republican state was established. It is important to note the influence of the Zaidists in this area, as it will be the seed of Ansar Allah.
 

In those years, in the middle of the 20th century, what we know today as Yemen was divided into the Yemeni Arab Republic, to the north, alienated from Saudi Arabia; and the Yemeni Democratic Republic, to the south, with strong ties to the Soviet Union. With the near dismantling of the USSR in the background, in 1990 both countries decided to unify, something that was done legally, but without taking into account the strong tensions between the two blocks, which led to a civil war in those years. Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had held the position of president of the Arab Republic of Yemen since 1990, became the head of the reunified Yemen in 2012.

The Republican regime led to the marginalization of Zaidism, which fed the discomfort with government authorities and created the breeding ground for Hussein al Houthi (1956-2004), the first leader of the Partisans of God, to start making speeches against the Sana'a Executive. Al-Houthi aimed to impose a Shiite theocratic regime, at least in the north of the country. 

The main themes of the sermons he delivered to his growing audience were the subjugation of the Muslim world to the tyranny of Jews and Christians, America's hostility to the Shiites, and the threat of Wahhabism - the most fundamentalist Sunni and dominant version in Saudi Arabia -. In fact, in the 1980s, the Sunni royalists managed to gain prominence in Yemen through Riyadh.

All these claims are understood in a context where the United States was immersed in the war of terror initiated by George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The former US commander saw the Saleh government as an ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda. It should be recalled at this point that the terrorist group settled in the south of the country at the end of the 20th century, taking advantage of the chaos of the civil war of the 1990s and creating a focus of Salafist jihadism. Saleh's collaboration with Washington resulted in significant economic amounts, something that the Houthis have traditionally used to show their rejection of government authorities, whom they accuse of being at the service of the American giant.

Tired of Saleh's rule, tinged with corruption and cruelty, the Yemeni Shiites began the insurgency. From 2002, in the north of Yemen, the proclamation of "Death to America, death to Israel, cursed be the Jews, victory for Islam" was heard. It was then, in 2004, that the first uprising took place with the aim of obtaining independence for the northern province of Sa'ada and thus protecting the Zaidi religion and its cultural traditions. In this struggle, Yemeni government soldiers killed Hussein al-Houthi and his brother, Abdul Malek al-Houthi, took over the leadership of the group and carried out five more rebellions before they agreed a ceasefire with the government in 2010.
 

But in 2011 the "Arab Spring" came, which also influenced the Yemeni scene. The Houthis saw the perfect opportunity to oust Saleh, whose term of office lasted more than thirty years. These popular protests and several assassinations attempt against him forced the president to resign in 2012 and the Houthis, being one of the few revolutionary groups with military experience, gained significant control of the territory.

As the militia became more powerful, it abandoned talks that sought a peaceful and democratic transition to create a new government in Yemen. In 2014, civil war finally broke out against the government factions led by the new president Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi. In 2015, they managed to take control of the capital, Sana'a, and forced al-Hadi to go into exile in Saudi Arabia. Then, Riyadh, with the support of its partner in the region, the United Arab Emirates, began a military campaign aimed at driving the Houthis from power. The so-called Arab Coalition was thus formed.
 

It should be noted at this point that the power games continued in Sana'a and the Houthis killed Saleh in 2017 when they discovered that he was about to change sides again - he had allied himself with the militia to ensure his own survival - causing the chaos in the country to multiply.

The Houthis have stated on several occasions that their tactics are based on those of the Vietcong and resistance movements in Latin America, as well as those of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, with which they share much of their thinking and actions. In fact, both the latter group and Iran have increased supplies of weapons and missiles and have provided military training and funding to Houthi rebels since the war began in 2014. Notably, the UN Panel of Experts in Yemen found that Tehran had provided the Houthis with fuel donations to increase their campaign revenues, although no direct financial link was found.

In 2016, peace talks began in Geneva, but so far, they have had no effect on the course of the conflict. Attacks between the Saudi Arabian-led coalition and the militia are constant. On 8 April, both sides established a space for dialogue with the announcement of a ceasefire and a peace proposal. No significant progress has yet been made. The human cost of this war, according to the UN, has been more than 6,800 civilians killed and at least 11,000 injured since March 2015.