We Should Pay Attention to the Ongoing Combat on the Red Sea

A generation of Americans involved in the Middle East has come to understand that there are two major branches of Islam, the Shiites and the Sunnis. Neither is monolithic, with each branch having several denominations. The division between the two goes back to questions about the succession to the prophet Muhammad (who died in 632). One faction of early believers invested leadership in senior disciples of the prophet from his Quraysh clan. Over the centuries, these became the Sunnis.

Another faction, which gradually evolved into the Shiites, favored Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Seeking a dynastic succession, they invested leadership in Ali’s descendants through the prophet’s daughter Fatimah. Most Shiites historically acknowledge 12 imams or leaders of the dynasty. The Zaydis, however, accepted only five early imams.

Unlike the Shiites of Iran and Iraq, Yemen’s Zaydis never had ayatollahs. Nor did they curse Sunnis, with whom they often had good relations. The Zaydi branch of Shiism in Yemen was led by court judges or qadis, typically hailing from a caste of putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sayyids or Sadah, who emerged as mediators in tribal feuds. Critics of today’s Helpers of God government in North Yemen allege that, despite its populist rhetoric, it is dominated by a handful of clans who consider themselves descendants of the prophet, including the Houthis themselves.

Saudi Hegemony and the Rise of the Houthis

Forms of Arab nationalism and a rhetoric of anti-imperialism are anything but new in Yemen. After World War II, with European empires weakened, a desire for independence swept the Global South. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt emerged as the nationalist leader who finally kicked the British out of his country, inspiring so many others in the region. Egyptian-backed young officers in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, staged a coup in 1962 against a hidebound theocratic leader who had long kept the country in a state of isolation. In the process, they drew it into a civil war between republican nationalists and royalists. Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all backed the royalists, but some 100,000 crack Egyptian troops won the day for the young officers before withdrawing in 1970.

In 1978, Colonel Ali Abdallah Saleh, a politician in North Yemen, launched an internal coup within the officer corps there and appointed himself president for life. His corrupt government, putatively a secular Arab nationalist one, would receive billions of dollars from the fundamentalist royalists of Saudi Arabia.

The Helpers of God party militia, or the Houthis, arose among the Zaydi Shiites of northern Yemen in the 1990s as a backlash against the inroads that neighboring, wealthy Wahhabi Saudi Arabia had made. That country’s Wahhabism had arisen as a puritan reform of Sunnism in the eighteenth century. Saleh allowed its missionaries to proselytize the Shiite Zaydis, provoking the anger of the latter.

Under the influence of the anti-Saudi Houthi family, Zaydi militiamen based in Saadeh in Yemen’s hardscrabble north turned radical, coming into frequent conflict with the Yemeni army. When the Arab Spring youth revolt overthrew Saleh in 2012, the Houthis’ political wing sought influence in the new government. But in September 2014, impatient with an interminable reform process aimed at drafting a new constitution and electing a new parliament, the Houthis marched into the capital, Sanaa, and took it over. Behind the scenes, they had allied with the deposed president, Saleh, before his death, and the army faction still loyal to him, which gave them access to billions of dollars in American-supplied weaponry. By early 2015, the Houthis had expelled Saleh’s successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, from the capital and made an unsuccessful bid to take over all of Yemen from Saadeh in the north to Aden in the south.

Meanwhile, their dominance of North Yemen proved unacceptable to the Saudis and the allied United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose secular potentate, Mohammed Bin Zayed, had long despised such Islamic political movements. As a result, those two countries launched an air war against the Helpers of God in the spring of 2015. The ruinous Seven Years War that followed would displace millions and endanger even more millions with food insecurity and disease. It failed, however, to dislodge the Helpers of God and, by 2022, a truce was finally agreed to. Perhaps thanks to that painful experience, the Saudis have declined to join the Americans this year in the Battle of Tihamah. And in some fashion, the Houthis’ experience of the intensive aerial bombing tactics of Saudi Arabia and the UAE years ago undoubtedly left them with particular sympathy for the Palestinians under incessant Israeli air assault in Gaza.

An Alliance of Resistance

Both the Saudis and the Emiratis saw the Houthis as a mere cat’s paw for Iran. Although the Iranians did indeed offer them some support, this was a distinct misreading of the relationship between Sanaa and Tehran. At the very least, Iranian aid was dwarfed by the billions of dollars in weaponry Washington provided to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in those years.

In reality, the Houthis are homegrown Yemeni nationalists, having even attracted some Sunni tribes into their coalition. Still, their current leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, has clearly been influenced by aspects of Iran’s political radicalism and chants “death to America” and “death to Israel” just the way Iran’s clerical leader Ali Khamenei does. Like the regime in Iran, the Houthi government has no respect for domestic human rights or dissent. Although there is no command line from Tehran to Sanaa, the Houthis do loosely form part of Iran’s “alliance of resistance” against Israel and the United States. However, it’s not clear that Iran, closely allied with Russia and China and covertly exporting its US-sanctioned petroleum to China, ever wanted international shipping costs to double, thanks to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, something which hurts all three of those countries.

Despite the Houthi appeal to religious identity, it’s also mainly a movement of Arab nationalists, which helps to explain its deep sympathy for the Sunni Palestinians as fellow Arabs. In an interview at the beginning of June, Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi condemned Israel for its genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and its targeting of the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem. He similarly denounced Washington as an imperial partner of Israel and an enabler of its crimes, as well as a hypocrite in theoretically promoting respect for the rule of law, while dismissing or even threatening international courts and supporting crackdowns at American colleges and universities when their students protested Israeli policies. He also praised the resistance of the vaguely allied forces of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias. In the process, he vowed that however intense American (and British) air attacks on Yemen became, he and his movement would never back down from their support of the Palestinian people.

At the moment, the situation in the Red Sea remains militarily muted, but it has the potential to become one of the most dangerous in the world, rivaling those in Ukraine and Taiwan. In the meantime, it remains a drag on the global economy, while helping to contribute to stubborn inflation and supply-chain problems.

Significant Houthi damage to a US naval vessel at any point in the future could plunge Washington into warlike acts that might risk direct conflict with Iran. President Joe Biden could, of course, lower the temperature by moving far more strongly to end Israel’s total war on Gaza, an intolerable affront to norms of international humanitarian law that only strengthens the vigilantism of the Houthis and their like. While the ongoing Israeli assault should be ended to prevent further death and looming mass starvation in Gaza, it should also be ended to forestall yet another ruinous American war in the Middle East.