Houthis have a lot to gain, little to lose from their maritime operations

OPINION:

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

On Feb. 24, the U.S. Central Command announced that it had conducted, alongside the United Kingdom, another round of strikes on Yemen’s Houthis, a small, Iranian-backed rebel group that commanded little international attention until it began a series of unnerving attacks on maritime shipping in mid-October. The operation hit 18 targets, including Houthi underground weapons storage sites, missile storage sites, one-way attack drones, air defense systems, radars and a helicopter.

So who are the Houthis, precisely? While many people have focused on Tehran’s ties to the Yemeni rebels, the group is not merely another Iranian proxy.

A Zaydi Shiite movement that emerged in the 1990s as a reaction to rising Saudi influence in Yemen, the Houthis were considered a largely local issue until they began to gain momentum during the Arab Spring and eventually took control of the capital, Sanaa, and the northwest of the country.

While the rebels received some nominal support from Iran beginning around 2009, it wasn’t until the Saudi-led military coalition invaded Yemen in March 2015 to confront the Houthis that Iran really began to ramp up its sponsorship. Since then, the Iranian regime has provided the group with military advice, training and small arms, as well as both advanced weapons and the components needed to build such systems in Yemen.

But don’t be fooled. While reports indicate that both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah commanders are in Yemen directing and overseeing Houthi maritime operations, there is no guarantee that Tehran could stop the group’s aggression in the Red Sea even if it wanted to. For although the Houthis have relied on Iran’s support for more than a decade, they are far from a totally owned subsidiary of Iran, and they still act autonomously. Take, for instance, cross-border attacks against the United Arab Emirates that were carried out in January 2022 despite a recent rapprochement between Iran and the UAE.

In fact, the Houthis have a lot to gain and little to lose from their maritime operations, which they have depicted as a response to the ongoing Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

For the Houthis, playing a role in the Israel-Hamas war is an opportunity to bolster their popularity and recruit new forces into their ranks. And so far, it’s working. The vast majority of Yemenis are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and thousands of them have gathered in Houthi-controlled Sanaa to show their support for Palestinians and protest Western attacks on Yemen, with some even criticizing the Biden administration’s decision to redesignate the group as a terrorist organization. Moreover, Houthi leaders say they have recruited and trained 200,000 new fighters since they began their maritime offensive.

All of that has helped delay the consequences of recent years of Houthi misrule, containing rising domestic discontent over issues such as the long-delayed payment of civilian salaries and widespread repression. In addition, the maritime operations help the group on the international stage, positioning them as a key regional supporter of Gaza and potentially garnering long-sought support not only from other Arab and Islamic countries but also those in the international community sympathetic to the Palestinians.

The Houthis also clearly hope that the attacks will give them new leverage in peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which initially urged the United States to refrain from retaliating lest it escalate the war in Yemen.

In short, there’s no easy answer to combating the Houthis, who have antisemitic and anti-Western ideology woven into their DNA — even the group’s flag displays the slogan “Allah is great, death to the USA, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”

Military strikes on the group may temporarily degrade its ability to launch such attacks. Still, the Houthis have long demonstrated that they can withstand such operations, and further escalation could risk getting the U.S. and its regional partners involved again in the long-simmering Yemen conflict. Moreover, redesigning the group as a terrorist organization — which the White House reluctantly did in January — is liable to have little tangible benefit, not least because the group has limited U.S. assets and is already under extensive sanctions. And given the Houthis’ independent streak, there’s no assurance that directly pressuring Iran would lead to any change in the rebels’ tactics or objectives.

To have a real chance at stopping the Houthis from threatening vital waterways, the Biden administration needs to exploit the public dissatisfaction that threatens their rule. In other words, putting the Houthis out of business in the Red Sea requires putting them out of business at home. The sooner policymakers in Washington focus on how to do precisely that, the better.

• Emily Milliken is a junior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington.