Amid Gaza War and Red Sea Attacks, Yemen’s Houthis Refuse to Withdraw
When the United States announced it would lead an international maritime task force to counter attacks on ships in the Red Sea, it didn’t take long for the group behind the attacks, the Houthi militia in Yemen, to hail the effort as a lost cause.
Within hours, a senior Houthi official was making the rounds on Arab television channels, describing the militia’s campaign of hijackings and rocket and drone launches against commercial ships as a righteous struggle to force Israel to end its siege of Gaza.
Western militaries had been trying to deter the Houthis for weeks, so the task force announced this week was “nothing new,” mocked Mohammed Abdusalam, the Houthis’ chief negotiator. And if the United States were to attack Yemen directly, he warned, it could turn the war in Gaza into an international conflagration.
“The Yemeni position is clear,” Abdullah Ben Amer, a senior Houthi official in a department that is part of the group’s Defense Ministry, told The New York Times. The Houthi escalation in the Red Sea will stop, he said, when “the Israeli war against the people of Gaza stops.”
These words reflected the position the Iran-backed militia has reiterated since the war in Gaza began two months ago with Hamas-led attacks that killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, officials say, and the Israeli response: bombing Gaza According to officials in the enclave, approximately 20,000 Palestinians have been killed.
The war has sparked anger in the Middle East against Israel and the United States, its key ally, and catapulted the Houthis — a once-faltering tribal group that controls northern Yemen — into an unlikely global spotlight. While many Arab governments have dealt with the war with aid and diplomacy, the Houthis mounted a fiery military assault, increasing their popularity in the region.
They launched drones and missiles at southern Israel and vowed to prevent all ships sailing to Israeli ports from passing through Yemen’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, a major chokepoint for global trade. Most of their attacks have been foiled, but last month they hijacked a commercial ship, and this month they hit a Norwegian ship with a missile, causing a fire. Their attacks have prompted the world’s largest shipping companies to divert ships, disrupting global trade and raising oil prices.
“The problem with the Houthis is that it is very difficult to deter them,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former Israeli official and senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.
The militia’s capabilities and apparent fearlessness have been honed by years of civil war. In 2014, the Houthis – who adhere to a religious ideology inspired by a sect of Shiite Islam – took over the Yemeni capital Sana. A Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention in an attempt to rout them, but it ultimately failed, leaving the Houthis in power in northern Yemen. There they have created an impoverished proto-state with which they rule iron fist.
Even Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who led the years-long military campaign against the Houthis and once said that “no country would accept having a militia on its border” – is not interested in keeping them to confront today as he turns around. focus on economic development.
“All this reinforces their perception that they are on the right track and that God is on their side,” said Nadwa Al-Dawsari, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.
Before the war in Gaza, the Houthis were close to signing an American-Saudi Arabia-backed deal that could have consolidated their position and paved the way for a broader peace process. But the Houthis also faced public discontent as Yemenis struggled with a lack of basic services and civil servants went without pay for years, contributing to widespread hungry.
The war in Gaza was a “dream come true” for the group, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow on the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research group based in London.
For decades, the Houthis had based their ideology on hostility toward the United States and Israel, and on support for the Palestinian cause. “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews” is part of the group’s slogan.
They have also become a major branch of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes armed groups across the Middle East. Analysts close to the Iranian government have said the Houthis’ base in Yemen makes them ideally positioned to escalate the regional conflict.
Now the Houthis have a chance to make their story come true, Mr. Al-Muslimi said, adding: “They can actually start a war with Israel.”
The Houthis have described their attacks as an attempt to secure the free flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, where more than two million Palestinians are struggling to get food and water.
“What is happening in Bab al-Mandab is nothing but an echo or a result of what is happening in Gaza,” said Mr Ben Amer, the Houthi official.
Eylon Levy, a spokesman for the Israeli government, called the Houthi attacks an “important wake-up call.” He also said: “The threat will be addressed.”
Still, the group’s motivations and history complicate efforts to deter them, Yemeni analysts say, a lesson the Saudi-led coalition learned during eight years of war. The kingdom and the United Arab Emirates faced international condemnation for their bombing of Yemen, much of it carried out with American assistanceand for a blockade that has plunged the country into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The threat of a broader regional war looms over efforts to tackle maritime attacks. US military planners have prepared preliminary Houthi targets in Yemen in case senior Biden administration officials order retaliatory strikes, two US officials said, although military officials say the White House has shown no appetite to respond militarily to the Houthis and risk a broader escalation.
The task force seemed to be carefully calibrated to avoid that. But as the war in Gaza causes grief and anger among Arab citizens and puts pressure on Arab leaders, the United States is struggling to rally some allies.
Only one Arab nation joined the task force: the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, where citizens announced plans to protest their government’s participation. Oman, which is mediating talks with the Houthis, will not force the group to stop its attacks until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, according to a person briefed by Omani officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. negotiations.
And Saudi Arabia does not seem interested in any kind of escalation.
“We are committed to ending the war in Yemen, and we are committed to a permanent ceasefire that opens the door to a political process,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said this month in a television interview.
“Everyone is looking for a way to de-escalate tensions,” Tim Lenderking, the US special envoy to Yemen, said in an interview. He recently returned from a trip to the Gulf, where he met with partners to discuss how to ensure maritime security while keeping the de facto Saudi-Houthi ceasefire on track.
But even before the war in Gaza, there were signs that the peace deal in Yemen that Saudi Arabia and the United States were pursuing was facing obstacles, including tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Much of southern Yemen is controlled by an Emirati-backed separatist group openly criticized the peace process.
“The deal itself is deeply flawed,” Ms al-Dawsari said. “The intention is for Riyadh to extricate itself from Yemen, even if that means handing Yemen over to the Houthis on a silver platter.”
Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment.
In parts of the Gulf, some political commentators have begun to do so to argue that it was US policy toward the war in Yemen that helped the Houthis prosper, pointing out that as the humanitarian crisis in Yemen deepened and children starving To the death, U.S. officials urged the Saudi-led coalition to scale back its activities.
Only after the ship attacks did “certain countries change their tune” on the Houthis, said Mohamed Bin al-Wazir al-Awlaki, who comes from a prominent family in Shabwa, an oil-rich region of Yemen where the Houthis were trying to to take over.
A maritime coalition to deter the Houthis is ultimately “a call for a return to war,” Mr. al-Awlaki said in a recent report. after on the social media platform X. He complained that the decision appeared to be driven by commercial motives rather than humanitarian or political considerations.
“It is clear that even if the region were to catch fire, there is nothing more important than international shipping lanes,” he said.
A Yemeni government official said he did not expect a peace deal for his country to be reached in the next two months. Speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media, he said international mediators would soon take their end-of-year vacation, putting peace efforts on hold.
Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting from Al Mukalla, Yemen; Erik Schmitt from Manama, Bahrain; And Ahmed Al Omran from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.