The Tightening Dark by Sam Farran

Author:Sam Farran [Farran, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE HOUTHIS COMETH

THE HOUTHIS’ BASE of power centered, and still centers, on their tribal lands in the far northern mountains of Yemen, almost on the border of Saudi Arabia, in and around the city of Saadah.

There the leader of the movement, Abd el-Malik al-Houthi, lives in guarded seclusion in the fashion of other rebel leaders: switching houses, video-taping statements to his followers rather than appearing in person, rarely keeping to a schedule or to a pattern of behavior. The Houthis fought six wars against the Yemeni government over the decade between 2004, when the Yemeni government placed a bounty on Abd el-Malik’s brother, a rising political star named Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, and the fall of 2014, when the Houthis marched victoriously into Sana’a.

During these years they engaged off and on in skirmishes with Saudi forces along the border, as well as with Sunni radicals, some of them Wahhabis coming in from Saudi Arabia, some of them homegrown Islahis, who adhered to a similar view on Islam as the al-Qaeda fighters. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi had been killed in the first war, after the price on his head rose from $55,000 to $75,000. His nascent movement—still officially called by the name he gave it, Ansarallah, or the Victors of Allah—took his name after his martyrdom, while his brother Abd el-Malik ended up running the show.

The Houthis had a chip on their shoulders compared to other Zaydi clans, since they were only the third- or fourth-most prestigious, and since they had suffered much worse than other clans through those six wars. When the other clans moderated their behavior, preferring to work with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and take whatever assistance (and cold cash) he provided, the Houthis took the road of rebellion and became something of a rallying point for more radical-minded Zaydis throughout Yemen, including a significant population of Zaydis in Sana’a’s Old City, right there under the nose of the US Embassy and the Yemeni authorities.

Throughout most of my time in Yemen, the Houthi wars experienced upticks and then calm periods. They became something of a feature of the landscape, just like al-Qaeda’s attacks and assassinations. Besides the occasional hot fighting that Ali Muhsin’s 1st Armor Brigade (and a few other units of Yemen’s army) brought to the mountains north and west of Sana’a, the Houthi problem seemed to be a regional one rather than a national one.

That changed toward the end of 2013.

First, as a gesture of reconciliation, the interim government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi returned Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi’s remains to Saadah for proper burial. Rather than reconciling, though, the Houthis took this as a victory. Some missteps by the government in denying certain people visas to attend the burial further aggravated and emboldened those in the group who were already advocating for increased militarism in the light of the interim government’s fragility.

A second, even bigger reason for the change in the Houthi dynamic was the collapse of a school, officially called the Dar al-Hadith, or House of Hadith, in a small village just to the south of Saadah.

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