Since the start of November the Houthis of Yemen have launched more than 20 attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
Nearly 15 percent of the world’s trade passes through the Red Sea. Already 20 percent of the ships have been diverted around South Africa, adding to transport costs and inflation. Those ship owners who continue to sail through the Red Sea are faced with rocketing insurance bills.
NATO ships have rushed to the region and the Houthis have been warned of terrible consequences if they continue their strikes.
So, who are the Houthis and why are they attacking the world’s shipping?
The answer to why is easy – Gaza. The Houthis hate Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US and they are rabid supporters of the Palestinian cause. The Houthi motto is: “God is the Greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. A Curse Upon the Jews. Victory to Islam.”
The who is slightly more complicated. For a start they are Shia Muslims which gives them a link to Iran’s mullahs. But, just to complicate matters, they are a different Shia sect known as the Zaydis. But shades of religious difference have not prevented an alliance between the Houthis and Tehran.
Next, the Houthis make up about 40 percent of the population of Yemen. Until about 1967 they were Yemen’s ruling elite for close to a 1,000 years.
It was about 1967 that the Saudis started using their oil money to interfere in Yemeni politics. The Saudi ruling family are Sunni and they have a problem with dissatisfied Shias in their Eastern Province along the border with Yemen.
The Saudis engineered the installation of a Sunni government in the capital of Sanaa and gradually the Houthis were eased out of jobs and positions of authority. By 1990 the Houthis were starting to form rebel cells and in 2014 a full-scale civil war broke out when they marched into and occupied Sanaa.
For eight years fighting raged between the Houthi rebels and internationally recognised Sunni government backed by Saudi Arabia. The Houthis secured the support of Iran because they were Shias and because Iran and Saudi Arabia hate each other. 150,000 people have died in the fighting. Four times that number have been wounded and crippled for life. Another 250,000, according to UN relief agencies, have died from famine or disease directly related to the war.
The Saudis spearheaded the war effort against the Houthis with blockades and indiscriminate air attacks. They were supported by Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain and the UAE. Also lending a hand with weaponry and intelligence were the US and UK.
But after the election of Joe Biden, Washington changed course and pressured the Saudis to ease up. Biden was not pro-Houthi. He was less pro-Saudi and anti the bad publicity being generated by the Saudi bombing campaigns.
The result was a successful Houthi offensive which has left them in control of two-thirds of Yemeni territory and the de facto ruler. Last April the Saudis agreed to a ceasefire which has so far held and diplomatic relations have been established between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The Houthis, however, are now sitting on a massive stockpile of drones, missiles, helicopters, gunboats, etcetera—all provided by Iran over the past decade.
Tehran denies that the Houthis are their proxies, or that they armed them. They are lying, at least about the weapons. For a start, several Iranian ships bound for Aden have been stopped and found crammed with weapons.
But just how closely tied they are to Iran is arguable. The Houthis have a distinct grievance and national cause and a cultural-religious link with Iran. Iran and the Houthis also have the common enemy of Saudi Arabia. The Iranians have provided the Houthis with arms to pursue their cause. Whether or not that makes them proxies is open to debate.
It is also not known whether the attacks on Red Sea shipping are at the behest of Tehran, approved of by Tehran or the actions of a well-armed rogue de facto state flexing its muscles in a popular cause. Iran claims that the Houthi attacks have nothing to do with them. But then they have lied in the past.
The West has the capability to eliminate the threat to Red Sea shipping in a matter of days. They have only to destroy the bases from which the Houthis are launching their missiles. helicopters and gunboats. But what would be the Iranian response? What would be the impact on the Yemeni ceasefire? Would the price of free passage through the Red Sea bring Iran racing to the aid of the Houthis and widen the Middle East War?
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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7 Comments
Tom,
Thank you for drawing attention to this topic which ought to be better known. You are right to point out that the Houthis belong to a different branch of Shi’ism from the Iranian Mullahs, but you still tend to see things a bit too much through the prism of a western, sectarian narrative about the Middle East’s problems.
The Houthis are Zaydi Shi’is, and although Shi’i are theologically closer to the Shafi’i Sunnis who make up the rest of Yemen’s population than to the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. It was a succession of Zaydi dynasties that ruled Yemen for centuries, not the Houthis who only appeared in recent decades. The Houthis are an Islamist revolutionary movement, and that is ultimately why the Saudis hate them and the Iranians support them. It has little if anything to do with Sunni-Shi’i sectarianism, which is not deep rooted in Yemen and (to the extent that it exists) is largely an import from the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. The political divide between the Houthi movement and the official Yemeni government is thus not a sectarian one. Nor,incidentally, was it in the days of the Zaydi imams who ruled the country until the 1960s.
Patrick Wintour asks: As Middle East crisis grows, does Iran have control of its proxy forces?
Chances of a regional flare-up rest on the unclear intentions of Tehran and the groups it has nurtured’
The dramatic first week of 2024 has tipped the scale towards those who say the daily diet of drone strikes, assassinations and maritime assaults will at some point combust into a major war across the Middle East.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/06/middle-east-crisis-grows-does-iran-have-control-proxy-forces
Patrick Cockburn replies: Biden has turned Gaza crisis into a Middle East catastrophe.
What could change Iranian calculations is a belief that an attack on its own territory is becoming likely. The Gaza war has killed off positive diplomatic contacts between the US and Iran, making it more likely that Iran will seek to manufacture a usable nuclear device – a prospect it has used hitherto as a form of leverage to extract concessions on sanctions.
Already the Gaza war is reshaping the Middle East and the wilder world.
https://app.inews.co.uk/full_page_image/page-30-1625/content.html
Might other powers have proxy forces too?
The convolutions and conflicts of the warrior patriarchies just underline the importance of liberals supporting the one state in the region which, for all its faults, shares our values.
What are the shared values?
“What are the shared values?”
A fair question for Mark Frankel. Perhaps he could also tell us which of Israel’s faults don’t matter to him.
Judge by actions, not values. If the West had fully participated in negotiations once the state of Israel was created much of this could have been avoided. It should have forseen that violence was not the solution to reforming the map of the Middle East.