In his inaugural speech on March 12, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, announced that “new fronts” would be opened in Tehran’s war against the United States and Israel. Khamenei singled out Yemen’s “brave and faithful” Houthi movement, which forms part of a now-reduced resistance coalition of Iraqi and Lebanese militia fighting to “shorten the path to eliminating the Zionist sedition.”
On March 26, the Houthis entered the war, launching two ballistic missile attacks over 2,000 kilometers into Israel. The date was selected to fall on the eleventh anniversary of the start of Saudi Arabia’s unsuccessful seven-year-long bombing campaign, launched in 2015, to roll back the Houthi takeover of the capital city Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, territory on which two-thirds of the population live.
In a speech on “the National Day of Steadfastness,” the movement’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, made a distinction between the Houthi intervention and the Arab nations in “servitude to the tyranny” of “Zionist Jews and their Western Zionist supporters.”
“Most regrettably,” al-Houthi said, “some regimes in this region have become entangled in serving them. They have opened their lands and deployed their wealth, media, and political positions in support of the aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
The following day, the Houthi armed forces outlined their rationale and red lines. Yahya Saree, their spokesman, foregrounded that their fight was against the “Zionist scheme” and to enforce the Gaza ceasefire, rather than based on its alliance with Iran. Crucially, he said that the Houthis would not attack Muslim countries unless they joined a coalition with the United States and Israel.
The Houthis emerged in the 1990s from Yemen’s Shia Zaydi population, a large religious minority whose heartland is the northern city of Saada. It was formed to combat corruption that they said had impoverished their territories…
Auteur: Arron Reza Merat
