The Houthis Are Very, Very Pleased

The Leader is a man of about 40, with a smooth, youthful face and a thin beard and mustache. In televised speeches, he wears a blazer with a shawl over his shoulders, his dark eyes menacing and humorless. Apart from that, so little is known about him that he might as well be a phantom. He has no birth certificate or passport and is said to have spent his formative years living in caves. No foreign diplomat has ever met him in person. He presides over a starving, brutalized people in northern Yemen and has sent an armada of child soldiers to their deaths. In January, one of his courts condemned nine men to be executed for homosexual behavior—seven by stoning, two by crucifixion.

Yet Abdulmalik al-Houthi may now be the most popular public figure in the Middle East. Ever since his soldiers began attacking and boarding commercial ships in the Red Sea in November—ostensibly in defense of Palestine—he has been treated like a latter-day Che Guevara, his portrait and speeches shared on social media across five continents. The Houthis’ bravado may not have done much for Gaza, but it has gouged a hole in the global economy, forcing maritime traffic away from the Suez Canal. It has also made the Houthis into heroes for young Arabs and Muslims who are embracing the Palestinian cause as their own. The Houthis have even made inroads among Western progressives, who helped make a TikTok star of “Tim-Houthi Chalamet,” a handsome young Yemeni who advertises his loyalty to the group.

The consequences of the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks are still hard to fathom. Almost overnight, a militant movement in the remote badlands of Yemen has found a terrifying new relevance: It has choked off the waterway that carries about 15 percent of the world’s trade. The U.S. Navy began firing back at Houthi launch sites in January—its most intense exchange of the 21st century to date—but even then, the Houthis did not back down.

One measure of the Houthis’ new power is that the proud Arab autocrats who hate them hardly dare to criticize them. They fear drawing more attention to the gap between their own tepid statements of support for Palestinians and the Houthis’ brazen defiance. Some are afraid that they, too, will become targets for Houthi missiles. The Arab leaders have long seen the Houthis as dangerous proxies for Iran, the group’s main military supplier, but some observers now say the truth may be even worse: that the Houthis are fanatics who answer to no one.

The Red Sea crisis has pushed the Arab world—and Saudi Arabia in particular—into a painful dilemma. Saudi diplomats have been working for years on an ambitious peace plan that would ease the Houthis’ political and economic isolation and reconcile them with their rivals in Yemen’s “legitimate” government in the south (which controls perhaps 30 percent of the population). But now, with dramatic new proof of the Houthis’ recklessness, the Saudis face the possibility that their efforts will only make Abdulmalik al-Houthi even more powerful, and more dangerous.

The Houthi spokesman was right on time for our meeting. I was a little surprised by his appearance; I had half expected to see a swaggering tribesman of the kind I used to meet in Yemen—mouth bulging with khat leaves, a shawl over his shoulders and a curved dagger in his belt. Instead, Abdelmalek al-Ejri was a neat-looking fellow in a blue-tartan blazer and a button-down shirt. He kept a physical distance as he greeted me, his manner polite but guarded, as if to register that we stood on opposite sides of a chasm.

We met in a spotless café in Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman. The city has for years been a kind of portal to the outside world for the Houthis, whose control of the Yemeni capital is not recognized by any country other than Iran. But it is an odd place to discuss Yemen because—despite their physical proximity and shared desert landscape—Oman is essentially the inverse of its neighbor. Where Yemen is lawless and violent, Oman is almost impossibly sedate and tidy, an Arab Switzerland. Omanis glide around in their elegant cloth head wraps and white dishdashas, looking serene; you can be arrested for rude public gestures or loud swearing, even for littering. Some of this, one imagines, is a deliberate effort to keep Yemen’s chaos at bay.

[Read: Were the Saudis right about the Houthis after all?]

I had been warned that al-Ejri, a diplomat of sorts, might downplay the aggressiveness and radicalism of the Houthis, who prefer to call their movement Ansar Allah, or “Partisans of God.” He did start off a little defensively, with a long speech about the unfairness of America’s blind support for Israel. But he also made clear that the Houthis are very, very pleased with their new global status, and they aim to wield it like a club. “We are more confident now, because we have huge public support,” he said. “This encourages us to speak on behalf of Yemen.” He meant all of Yemen, though the Houthis control less than half of Yemen’s territory.

He went on to boast that the Houthis have outpaced their longtime patron in the so-called Axis of Resistance. “Our stance on Gaza is more advanced than anyone, even Iran,” he said. “Iran was shocked that Ansar Allah had the guts to do what we did.” Although the relationship is clearly very close—Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials are said to be in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, right now—the Houthis do appear to have considerable independence and are believed to have shrugged off Iranian advice several times in the past. (Unlike some other Iranian allies, the Houthis are not mainstream Shiites and are not bound by the Khomeinist doctrine of rule by clerics.)

I asked him whether the Houthis would be willing to share power with other Yemeni political groups and was amazed again by the brashness of his answer. Abdulmalik al-Houthi will remain the supreme political authority in Yemen under any future government, he said, because his power comes directly from the people and is therefore beyond question. He then volunteered a comparison with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and another close ally of the Iranian regime. But al-Ejri added that al-Houthi will be “stronger and bigger” than his Lebanese counterpart, because the Houthis are and will be “the main player, the main stakeholder” in Yemen. In other words, al-Houthi will be a kind of counterpart to the supreme leader in Iran, who has the final word on all affairs of state.

The Houthis weren’t always this open about their political agenda. I first came across them in 2008, when I made frequent trips to Yemen as a Beirut-based correspondent for The New York Times. I was standing outside a Sanaa courthouse one morning when an armored vehicle charged up and screeched to a halt. It had barred windows, and as the guards got out, I could hear the prisoners inside chanting in unison: “God is Great! Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse on the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

The Yemeni reporters alongside me were as baffled as I was. We knew that the Houthis were an insurgent group in the country’s northern mountains who had been fighting an on-and-off war with the Yemeni state for years. We knew that they placed enormous, almost comical importance on their freedom to recite the words we had just heard, known to them as the sarkha, or “shout” (it had been banned by the government). But no one seemed to know what they wanted, why they were fighting, or how many they were. Al-Houthi, their leader, said in interviews at the time that they were simply defending themselves and wanted only to be left alone.

Even 10 years later, when they had conquered Yemen’s capital and were ruling most of its population, a penumbra of mystery surrounded them. I used to discuss the movement with Hassan Zaid, who knew its founders and was a well-respected scholar of Zaydi Islam, the sect to which the Houthis belong (like most people in the far north). During my last visit to Sanaa, in late 2018, I asked Zaid if the Houthis had a political vision. He replied promptly that they had none. He was serving as the group’s youth minister at the time, so I was a little taken aback. “The problem with the Houthis is that they are a reaction to other people’s behavior,” he said.

Zaid had doctrinal differences with the Houthis, whose ideology strays far from Zaydi orthodoxy. When he was gunned down by mysterious assailants in 2020, I was saddened—I had always liked him—but not surprised. Several other eminent Zaydi figures who had criticized the Houthis were murdered under similar circumstances. The Houthis, naturally, blamed the Saudis.

Being coy may have suited the Houthis in the early days, and their ambitions may have evolved over time. But a will to power is built into their origin story. The Houthi family belongs to a caste that stood at the top of the social hierarchy in northern Yemen for more than 1,000 years. As Sayyids—claiming lineal descent from the Prophet Muhammad—they were part of the same group as the religious monarchs known as Imams who ruled the area for most of that time. Their fortunes changed when a group of young officers ousted the last Imam in 1962 and formed a republic. Afterward, the northern Sayyids were scorned as relics of a benighted theocratic era, and many fell into poverty.

Things got even worse for the Houthis in the early 1980s, when the Saudis—shaken by the Iranian revolution—began promoting their own brand of hard-line religion in northern Yemen. Yemen had never had a serious sectarian problem. But as Saudi-funded preachers spread their intolerant Wahhabi faith, the Zaydi clerics decided that they had to fight back. They trained a new generation of revivalist Zaydis who were steeped in anger at the House of Saud and its American ally. Among the most zealous was a young man named Hussein al-Houthi.

Hussein’s ambitions went far beyond defending Zaydism. He traveled to Iran and to Sudan, which was an entrepôt for all sorts of Islamists in the 1990s. When he came home, he transformed his family’s experience (and his own) into a new ideological weapon: a combustible blend of historic entitlement and outraged victimhood. He grew even more radical after Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s longtime president, pledged his full support to George W. Bush in the War on Terror, which some Islamists saw as a war on Islam. It was then that the Houthi sarkha was first heard.

Hussein’s teachings, gathered in a 2,129-page online document called the Malazim (“installments”), are now revered by the movement almost as much as the Quran itself. Gun-toting Houthi soldiers can be found scrutinizing them with a special Android smartphone app.

The Malazim contains a kind of blueprint for religious dictatorship—an updated version of the Imamate. According to the Princeton-based scholar Bernard Haykel, who lived in Yemen for years, Hussein proclaimed the need for a supreme leader who embodies a “cosmic revolutionary ethos” and will act as a “guide for the community and the world.” Most mainstream Muslims (and even many Zaydis) would consider all of this hideously idolatrous.

Hussein’s status was further elevated by his martyrdom at the hands of Yemeni soldiers in 2004. His younger brother Abdulmalik then took the helm and led the intermittent wars against the Yemeni government until 2010. Much of northern Yemen was devastated during these years, but the movement came out stronger after each conflict, thanks to the Yemeni government’s corruption and perceived cruelty. The Houthis have always been lucky in their enemies.

One reason the Houthis have been so poorly understood is that their movement arose in the shadow of the Saudi monarchy. The arrogance and wealth of the Saudis, and the poisonous influence of their puritanical Wahhabi clerics, lent credence to the Houthis’ argument that they were just defending themselves. And the Saudis share some blame for creating this desert Frankenstein, having meddled recklessly in Yemen for many years.

Riyadh tried to play a more constructive role after 2012, when protests brought down Saleh. Saudi Arabia oversaw a shaky transition and pumped billions of dollars into Yemen. But in the political vacuum that followed, the Houthis—with an army hardened by years of war—seized much of the country while pretending to play along with a democratic process.

In early 2015, a few months after capturing the capital, the Houthis signed a deal with Iran, which had already been surreptitiously providing them with weapons and training. The Houthis began running 14 flights a week between Sanaa and Tehran, while the Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent officers and arms directly to their new allies in the Axis of Resistance. This was too much for Riyadh. The Saudis assembled a coalition and declared war. The Obama administration reluctantly supported them, worrying that it would be pulled into an unwinnable proxy war against Iran.

[Read: The Houthis have backed Iran into a corner]

The war backfired, as expected. Poorly trained Saudi pilots, fearing anti-aircraft fire, dropped their bombs from too high, and indiscriminate raids killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. With the Saudi coalition imposing a blockade, food became scarce and much of the population was pushed to the brink of starvation. The Yemeni forces fighting alongside the coalition were weakened by factional divisions and corruption. As the years passed, the Houthi counterattacks became more effective. By 2019 the Houthis were firing ballistic and cruise missiles at Saudi oil fields and airports, and although the Saudis were able to intercept most of the strikes, the struggle was becoming painfully asymmetrical. Patriot interceptors can cost more than $1 million apiece, while Houthi armed drones are worth a few hundred dollars.

In early 2022, a Houthi missile struck an oil-distribution station in Jeddah during Formula 1’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, one of the kingdom’s signature tourist events. A huge plume of black smoke was visible from the track. The Saudis had made efforts toward a peace deal for several years, but this time Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appears to have decided that enough was enough. The United Nations brokered a cease-fire a week later. Saudi negotiators, together with a UN envoy, began talking to the Houthis about a longer-term peace agreement.

The accord, known in diplo-speak as “the road map,” goes well beyond ending the war. It aims to pave the way for a happier future in Yemen, with provisions for reconstruction, the departure of all foreign forces, and an “inclusive” political dialogue between the Houthis and their rivals in southern Yemen, whom they have fought intermittently for a decade.

The road map will also withdraw restrictions on the Houthis’ main ports and airports, which have been blockaded for years. That will open their doors to the world and bestow a legitimacy they have long craved while providing a huge boost to their income. On top of this, the agreement would commit the Saudis to paying salaries to state employees in every part of Yemen, including soldiers, for at least six months. This could amount to as much as $150 million a month, a vast sum in Yemen. Most of it would go to the Houthi-controlled part of the country, where the bulk of the population lives. In all likelihood, some percentage of those salaries will be funneled into the Houthi war machine, which has mastered various methods of extorting cash from an impoverished population.

In other words, the road map will transform the Houthis from a terrorist group into a state. Whether this will nudge them toward greater maturity or merely enable their worst instincts remains to be seen. It may, among other things, allow Iran to airlift weapons directly to the Houthis rather than shipping them surreptitiously in disguised boats, as it has been doing for about 15 years. The Saudis are taking these risks because MBS does not want any more disruptions to Vision 2030, his extravagant bid to transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and society.

The road map is also likely to equip the Houthis for a war of conquest against all the areas of Yemen they do not already control. They have tried to capture these areas in the past, and they have made no secret of their desire to dominate the entire country. Whether they would stop at the border is anyone’s guess. Houthi propaganda includes threats to strike deep into Saudi Arabia and capture Mecca, and (even more improbably) Jerusalem. The Saudis are so nervous about this that none of the officials I met with during a recent trip to Riyadh would agree to be quoted.

The road-map negotiations were long and difficult. Hearing about them made me pity the people whose job it was to sit across the table from the Houthis. Several I spoke with described a string of exhausting sessions with men who are masters at the art of upping the ante, which they did, time and again. One example: The salaries of Yemeni government workers were initially supposed to be covered partly by taxes on a Houthi-controlled port and partly by profits from Yemen’s own oil and gas. By the end, the Saudis had agreed to pay for it all.

Abdulmalik al-Houthi followed the negotiations closely and is clearly in charge: “The buck stops with him,” one diplomat who was involved told me. “He has a command of the details, not just the vision.” Only on rare occasions does he engage directly with foreigners, and the ritual is always the same. The visitors arrive in Sanaa, where they are driven by Houthi officials to a private house. They are shown into a room with a desk and computer monitor, and al-Houthi speaks to them by video link from his stronghold in the northwestern city of Saada, 110 miles away.

In the end, the Houthis got what they wanted, because the Saudis were desperate to close the deal. “Their attitude is, We won,” the diplomat told me. “Anyone who wants to share power must do so under their terms.”

The Saudis say that they only facilitated the discussions over the road map, which is billed as an agreement between the Houthis and their rivals in Yemen’s “internationally recognized” government, based in the south. This is a legal fiction. The southern government is an unelected puppet, entirely dependent on Saudi largesse to stay afloat. It is also a facade, beneath which is a congeries of mutually hostile southern factions. One thing they agree on is hatred of the road map, which they see—with some justification—as a capitulation to Houthi demands. But they cannot say so, because that would endanger the paychecks from Riyadh.

This was painfully apparent when I went to meet the president of Yemen, Rashad al-Alimi. Although his government is based in Yemen, he lives and holds his meetings in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh—a palacelike building set apart from the rest of the city, with a marble ballroom where four prancing horses, cast in brass and copper, loom over the guests. The symbolism of the setting was impossible to ignore. Back in 2017, the Ritz-Carlton was transformed into the world’s most lavish prison when Mohammed bin Salman arrested dozens of Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful figures, accused them of corruption, and forced them to sign over much of their wealth.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

Al-Alimi is not a prisoner, but he isn’t exactly free. A slim, bald 70-year-old with a tiny mustache, he greeted me with pained courtesy, like a doctor who is reluctant to deliver bad news. He talked at length about the cruelties the Houthis have inflicted on the Yemeni city of Taiz, his hometown. The Houthis, he said, “broke all the taboos of wartime,” using snipers to fire on civilians and condemning female political prisoners to death.

When I asked about the road map, al-Alimi couldn’t bring himself to praise it. “I believe peace is the top priority for Yemen,” he said, looking melancholy. Not long afterward he said, “The Houthis will come to peace only after they are defeated.” He left it to me to draw the obvious conclusion. He would sign the accord, but he considered it a mistake.

The contrast between al-Alimi’s dour mood and the glowing confidence of the Houthis was almost embarrassing. When I mentioned al-Alimi to Abdelmalek al-Ejri, the Houthi representative in Oman, his face broke into a sarcastic grin. “We refuse to let the Saudis deal with us in the way they deal with the so-called legitimate government,” he said. He dismissed al-Alimi as a figurehead with no real authority, whose one virtue is that he will sign the road map if the Saudis tell him to: “Anything the Saudis say, he will reply ‘yes.’”

Some southern-Yemeni leaders are more willing to say what they think. In January, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, who is al-Alimi’s deputy but also heads an armed faction that favors an independent state in southern Yemen, criticized the American-led air strikes, saying that they would not be enough to deter the Houthis. Zoubaidi has called for the West to provide arms, intelligence, and training to the factions in the south, so that they can at least contain the Houthis, if not push them back. His boldness is related to his pocketbook; his main patron has been the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia.

The southerners’ frustration is understandable. Although the Houthis have won a reputation as fierce warriors, they have suffered a few real setbacks at the hands of their Yemeni rivals. In 2018 the Houthis nearly lost their economic lifeline, the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast. If the southern soldiers had pushed just another few miles to the port, they would have forced the Houthis to their knees. At a minimum, the Houthis would have had to make painful concessions, and in all likelihood, they would not be fighting a naval war in the Red Sea today.

Instead, the Saudi coalition withdrew from Hodeidah under pressure from the United States and aid groups who warned that the battle could lead to an even deeper humanitarian catastrophe. Some analysts and human-rights workers now believe that those concerns were exaggerated amid an atmosphere of widespread anger at the Saudis.

In fact, the Houthis may well have been rescued—not for the first time—by a bizarre twist of fate. In early October of that year, Saudi agents killed and dismembered the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Gory details of the murder leaked to the press, and a wave of fury engulfed the Saudis, who were already being criticized for their indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. I shared that anger; I knew Khashoggi well and had many long talks with him in Riyadh. But his death became a political football whose uses were difficult to foresee at the time.

The Saudi government was forced into a defensive crouch, and international allies no longer had the patience to support its fight for an obscure port on the Red Sea. The UN organized a cease-fire that required both sides to withdraw, but the Houthis have since violated it and regained control of the port. In retrospect, it seems possible that the outrageous public murder of a single famous man became the shield for a movement that has since killed thousands of Yemenis.

Can the Houthis be dislodged? They can seem invincible, especially now that they have successfully branded themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause. That posture appears to have entrenched their power at home as well, helping them recruit some 16,000 new soldiers in the first month of the Gaza war, according to one independent report. In the areas they control, they have made the schools into factories of propaganda and war-mongering. A recent university exam in the city of Ibb featured a question about geometry, using missiles fired into the Red Sea as an example. Women are now discouraged from driving, and gender segregation is more rigid. Fear and censorship are more pervasive. One of my longtime friends in Sanaa now erases his texts to me as soon as I have read them.

Even the Houthis’ weaknesses are dangerous, because they foster a dependence on war. Their government is incompetent and bankrupt. Food prices have shot up, and Yemen’s ability to export labor—its mainstay for decades—is crashing, thanks partly to a lack of job training. Remittances from abroad (mostly Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia) have dropped, and conditions are only getting worse. Acute malnutrition is rampant, leaving many young people with stunted limbs and brain damage. Inflows of food aid are way down even though roughly 80 percent of the population depends on them. The road map includes a formula for sharing revenues from Yemen’s oil and gas reserves, which are located outside the Houthi zone of control, and have been largely offline for years. But skeptics say that mutual hatred will scuttle that. The Houthis have clashed with southern factions in recent weeks, and some observers worry the two-year cease-fire may be fraying.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The Decatur option]

If civil war breaks out again, Iran hawks in the United States may call for re-arming the southern factions as a military counterweight. Some Saudi leaders may even see a civil war as useful in weakening the Houthis, as long as Riyadh can stay out of the fighting. But such a war would pit a Shiite alliance in the north against Sunni forces in the south, inflaming sectarian rivalries and drawing in jihadists from other countries. New versions of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State would bloom in the desert. Does anyone really want to go down that road again?

Unfortunately, every possible course is risky. Breaking the Houthis may be impossible, but they don’t bend easily, either. Perhaps, without a war to rally the faithful, the Houthis could be pressured toward compromise and consensus. Yemenis are famously unruly and independent-minded, and they have shown signs of discontent with Houthi rule. Some observers think that the Saudis could play a positive role by reviving the deep network of influence they had before Saleh was overthrown, as long as they wield it more wisely. Promising pockets of local governance in areas of Yemen outside of Houthi control could ultimately serve as models in the north.

For the outside world, there is a larger concern: Now that the Houthis have shown what they can do in the Red Sea, what is to stop them from finding new pretexts to do it again? Their arsenal includes unmanned, explosive-packed boats and submarines, with parts provided by Iran. If one of these were to strike an American naval vessel, it could kill a lot of sailors. This is exactly what happened 24 years ago, when suicide attackers in a boat struck the U.S.S. Cole off the southern Yemeni coast, in one of the opening acts of al-Qaeda’s long confrontation with what it called “the far enemy.”

The diplomats who wrote the road map now say it must be revised with these dangers in mind. “We can’t just let bygones be bygones and forget all this happened,” one American official told me. “The peace process will have to ensure that the Houthi threat is contained, and that the Houthis are not further emboldened and empowered.”

How do you contain a force as volatile and reckless as the Houthis? The road map will need to provide an answer, or it could lead to a very dark dead end.