Can anyone stop the Houthis?

Excerpt

Yemen has always been defined by its topography. A landscape of narrow coastal plains, mountainous highlands, and a desert interior, has helped preserve tribal identities, blurring and softening sharp religious divisions. If a very modern, post-1979 battle between Sunnis and Shi’ites now defines the country’s politics, a rugged and inescapable geography continues to impose itself. This is clear enough with the Zaydi Shi’ites, now better known by the name of a martyred Islamist leader: Hussein al-Houthi. Combining a deep knowledge of their country’s landscape with revolutionary zeal, the Houthis have coalesced into an unrivaled fighting force, as well as Iran’s best allies in its war against America and Israel – costing Tehran surprisingly little money.

Indeed, the more you learn about the Houthis, the less surprising it becomes that the group should have embarrassed the US Navy in 2024 and 2025 (in a foretaste of the second Iran war, Washington simply gave up firing its expensive missiles at Houthi forces), and fought a large Sunni-Arab coalition to a standstill between 2015 and 2019. Despite intense bombardments, and serious battlefield defeats, the Houthis have retained Sana’a, Yemen’s capital which they conquered in 2014. Only the Israelis, who briefly got into a missile exchange with the Houthis in 2025, have managed to deter them: they went after the Houthis’ oil supplies, energy infrastructure, ports, airports, and, perhaps most important, senior personnel. Sure enough, the Houthis stopped firing at Israel. But either way, it’s little wonder that the Houthis are now back, seizing land along the Red Sea littoral and the islands of Perim and Greater and Lesser Hanish, thereby putting into jeopardy Saudi Arabia’s capacity to export oil via its east-west pipeline.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a Resident Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.