When the United States announced it was leading an international maritime task force to confront attacks on ships in the Red Sea, it did not take long for the group behind the attacks, the Houthi militia in Yemen, to dismiss the effort as a lost cause.
Within hours, a top Houthi official was making the rounds on Arabic television channels, describing the militia’s campaign of hijackings and missile and drone launches at commercial ships as a righteous battle to force Israel to end its siege on Gaza.
Western militaries had already spent weeks trying to deter the Houthis, so the task force announced this week was “nothing new,” scoffed Mohammed Abdusalam, the Houthis’ chief negotiator. And if the United States directly attacked Yemen, he warned, it could turn the war in Gaza into an international conflagration.
“The Yemeni position is clear,” Abdullah Ben Amer, a high-ranking 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 on the people of Gaza stops.”
Those words echoed the stance that the Iran-backed militia has repeated since the war in Gaza began two months ago with the Hamas-led attacks that killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, officials say, and the Israeli response: bombardments in Gaza that have killed around 20,000 Palestinians, officials in the enclave say.
The war has sparked fury across the Middle East at Israel and the United States, its main ally, catapulting the Houthis — a once-scrappy tribal group that controls northern Yemen — into an unlikely global spotlight. While many Arab governments have addressed the war through aid and diplomacy, the Houthis embarked on a fiery military assault, increasing their popularity around the region.
They launched drones and missiles at southern Israel and pledged to block all ships traveling to Israeli ports from passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait near Yemen, a key choke point for global trade. Most of their attacks have been thwarted, but last month, they hijacked a commercial vessel, and this month, they struck a Norwegian ship with a missile, starting a fire. Their attacks have forced the world’s largest shipping companies to reroute vessels, disrupting global trade and increasing oil prices.
“The problem with the Houthis is it’s very hard to deter them,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former Israeli official and a 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 espouse 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 ultimately failed, leaving the Houthis in power in northern Yemen. There, they have created an impoverished proto-state that they rule with an iron fist.