Houthis (Ansar Allah)

A Zaydi revivalist movement from a mountain province that ended up running most of Yemen and attacking shipping on the other side of the world. The movement began in the 1990s in Saada as a religious revival among Zaydi Shia, a community that had ruled northern Yemen for a millennium until 1962 and felt displaced afterwards by both the republic and the spread of Saudi-funded Salafism. It takes its name from the family that led it; Hussein al-Houthi was killed by government forces in 2004, which turned a protest movement into an insurgency, and six rounds of war with the Yemeni state followed. The collapse of that state after the 2011 uprising gave the movement its opening: allied for a time with the former president it had spent a decade fighting, it took Sanaa in September 2014 and drove the internationally recognised government out of the country. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015 expecting a short campaign. The war that followed killed hundreds of thousands including from hunger and disease, and produced what the United Nations repeatedly called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The movement receives weapons and technical support from Iran, though it is not a proxy in the sense of taking orders. It survived eight years of bombing. From late 2023 it attacked shipping in the Red Sea in connection with the war in Gaza, cutting traffic through Suez sharply. It governs the majority of Yemen's population. The movement's formal name is Ansar Allah. Saada province in the far north is its heartland and Sanaa the capital it holds. Around 70 per cent of Yemenis live in territory it controls. The Saudi-led intervention began in March 2015. Zaydis make up roughly a third of Yemen's population.

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