LONDON: In 2011, I stood in Change Square in the Yemeni capital Sanaa with thousands of young Yemenis chanting for democracy, dignity and human rights.
But three years later, a different force marched into the same capital — armed, disciplined and completely uninterested in anything we were calling for.
Today, they control ballistic missiles, drones and the ships passing through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
They call themselves Ansar Allah, or supporters of God, but they are more commonly known as the Houthis.
This is how they got here.
In 893 C.E., a branch of Shiite Islam called Zaydism took root in the mountains of northern Yemen.
Zaydism is actually the closest Shiite sect to Sunni Islam. Its followers do not believe in the 12 imams that define the mainstream Shiite theology in Iran, but they do believe that political power belongs by right to the descendants of Prophet Muhammad — not to voters, but to bloodline.
The Zaydi kingdom, known in Yemen as the Imamate, ruled on and off for over a thousand years.
It collapsed several times throughout the centuries, but its main political ideas remained up until 1962, when a republican revolution overthrew the Imamate and tried to build a modern nation state.
The Yemen Arab Republic, also known as North Yemen, introduced new schools, new hospitals, new laws and a constitution built on citizenship, not caste.
But for the old Zaydi religious establishment that was not progress — it was extinction.
By 1990, when North and South Yemen unified under a new democratic constitution, most Zaydi scholars accepted the new order, but a hardline faction did not.
One of them was a scholar named Badreddin Al-Houthi and his sons would turn that resistance into a war.
In the early 1990s, a revivalist Zaydi movement emerged in Saada province, up in the north, called the Believing Youth, in an attempt to keep the old faith alive under the new republic.
Its most consequential member was Badreddin Al-Houthi’s son Hussein. He served in parliament in the 1990s, but everything changed after a 1995 trip to Iran with his father. Hussein came back with a new vision, not just religiously but ideologically.
He fused traditional Zaydi belief with something new — Khomeinism, the revolutionary anti-Western, anti-Israel doctrine of Iran’s 1979 revolution, named after Ayatollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of Iran.
Hussein pushed aside the Zaydi movement’s original founders and rebuilt it in his own image.
After 2000, it stopped being a study circle and started looking like a militia, modeled almost deliberately on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In 2004, war broke out between the Houthis and the Yemeni state. Hussein was killed that same year in a clash with the Yemeni army.
The leadership then passed to a younger brother, one the world would come to know very well — Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi.
Six wars followed from 2004 to 2010. And although the Houthis lost ground, they never lost the movement.
And in the mountains of Saada, they built something the Yemeni state could not easily undo — control.
Then came 2011 and the Arab Spring. For a moment, it looked like the Houthis would become part of Yemen’s democratic future.
Yemenis poured into the streets to demand the end of the 33-year rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of Yemen since unification in 1990.
Civil society leaders hoped to build the broadest possible coalition, and invited the Houthis to join. To most activists, they looked like a provincial insurgency with a grudge against the central government, not a national threat.
Abdul Malik Al-Houthi announced his movement supported the youths’ demands and the protesters welcomed them.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation.
While the country’s attention stayed fixed on the capital, Sanaa, the Houthis cut a deal with a Yemeni tribal arms trafficker called Faris Manna, who in 2010 had been sanctioned by the UN and the US for having allegedly “directly or indirectly supplied, sold or transferred to Somalia arms or related material in violation of the arms embargo.”
That enabled the Houthis to seize the city of Saada for the first time. They made Manna governor, and in exchange they took the military infrastructure and Saada became the first Yemeni province to fall entirely under Houthi rule.
Later that year, under a GCC initiative, Saleh agreed to step down in exchange for immunity and a transitional government took over.
But the Houthis rejected the deal outright, calling it a Western-Saudi Arabia conspiracy against Yemen’s revolution, and they refused to disarm.
Soon after, something almost nobody predicted happened. Saleh, the man the Houthis had fought for a decade, became their tactical ally against the new government.
In February 2012, a development took place that should have been a warning sign. Traditional Zaydi scholars signed a new document with the Houthis called the Intellectual and Cultural Manifesto, which laid out the movement’s real vision.
Power, it said, belonged exclusively to the descendants of the prophet, not to elected officials or the constitution.
This was not a group defending Saada from a hostile government anymore. This was a movement with a theological blueprint for ruling the entire country.
Around this time, Iran started paying closer attention. In the period from 2011 to 2012, Tehran handed the Yemeni file to an organization with deep experience running foreign proxies — Hezbollah.
Lebanese handlers organized seminars for Yemeni activists, ostensibly about the Arab Spring.
In reality, they were vetting recruits. The point man was a Hezbollah commander, using the alias Abu Mustafa. His real name was Khalil Yusif Harb, who was later designated as a global terrorist by the US, with a $5 million bounty on his head.
Promising recruits were passed up the chain to an Iran Revolutionary Guard handler who lived in Beirut and were eventually flown to Iran.
Between 2012 and 2014, Houthi delegations, including military commanders, traveled regularly to Iran and Lebanon for training in telecommunications, missile systems and drone warfare.
In January 2013, Yemeni authorities, with US help, intercepted a ship loaded with Iranian weapons, bound for the Houthis, including surface-to-air missiles, military-grade explosives and rocket-propelled grenades. Tehran denied everything, but the evidence kept piling up.
By September 2014, the Houthis were ready, and when they finally moved on the capital, almost nobody stood in their way.
The government barely resisted and the same civil society activists who had welcomed the Houthis back in 2011 were next.
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The Houthis carried out a mass detention campaign targeting Yemen’s civil society.
Those who could not flee were detained, tortured and abused, and many died under torture.
By September 2015, Abdul Malik Al-Houthi had a new target — the press.
In a televised speech, he told his followers that journalists were more dangerous than enemy combatants, and more than 80 media outlets were shut down.
Religious minorities were targeted from the start. Yemen’s ancient Jewish community, which had been present in the country for more than 3,500 years, was harassed, humiliated and eventually forced out entirely. The last three families left in March 2021.
The Baha’i community faced imprisonment and also expulsion.
But here is what made the Houthis different from a typical rebel government. They did not bother replacing the state. They hollowed it out and ran it in parallel.
Every ministry, every province, every neighborhood got something called a supervisor. Supervisors extorted businesses, ran black markets on fuel, and answered to no one but the network above them.
As a result, basic services collapsed.
Every supervisor owed the network three things — a cut of their revenue flowing upwards, an ongoing indoctrination campaign and constant recruitment.
Families were coerced to send their children as recruits in exchange for receiving humanitarian aid.
This is where things stand today. The Houthis control most of the northwestern parts of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, and most of the population.
A shaky truce that began in April 2022 froze the conflict, but would not stand the test of time.
Following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, the Houthis turned their Iranian-supplied missiles and drones on international shipping in the Red Sea.
The movement that started as a provincial religious revival now sits at the center of one of the world’s most important chokepoints. They are armed, entrenched, and strongly tied to Tehran.
Yemen’s war is not just a proxy conflict, or a humanitarian crisis, or a shipping lane story. At its core, it is still the same clash that it always was — a modern republic that Yemenis built in 1962 against a movement that never accepted it.
• Baraa Shiban is a researcher and political analyst on Yemen and the Gulf.
