Who Are the Houthis?

There’s a good briefing at Deutsche-Welle on the Houthis. Here’s a snippet:

The Houthis emerged in the 1980s, forming a broad tribal alliance in Yemen’s north based on a revival of Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam, in opposition to an expanding Salafism.

They were also motivated by what they saw as Saleh’s economic discrimination of the north.

After morphing into a militia in the 2000s, they fought six rounds of war from 2004-2010 against then-President Saleh’s forces, until the 2011 Arab Spring uprising toppled him.

When two years of national dialogue broke down, the Houthis ousted the new Saudi-backed Yemeni leader Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and took Sanaa.

After they allied with their former enemy Saleh, fearing their growing power, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with help from the US and UK, opened an air and ground war against them.

There are several key points to keep in mind. First, the Saudi intervention in Yemen is not the result of attacks by Yemenis on Saudi Arabia but Saudi interference in a Yemeni civil war. Second, although Iranian support for the Houthis is pretty obvious now, it’s not nearly as obvious that the Iranians were supporting the Houthis prior to Saudi Arabia’s effectively installing their man as the ruler of Yemen in 2012.

And then there’s this. Although the “drone” attack on Saudi oilfields have gotten enormous publicity what has received much less is that the Yemenis are, essentially, winning on the ground. The Saudi army is essentially incompetent. The Saudi air force is only able to maintain its campaign against Yemen, in what has been called the “world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe”, deliberately targeting children, hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets, with U. S. support.