Executive Summary

• Political deadlock and the absence of broad social acceptance pushed the movement toward an alternative path based on armed organisation.
• Allowing an armed actor to participate in negotiations without requiring it to disarm enabled the movement to accumulate political legitimacy and military power simultaneously.
• The generation whose political consciousness took shape before 2004 is less vulnerable; the greater danger concerns the generation born after the takeover.
• The fundamental weakness of the National Resistance on the western coast is the absence of a clear combat doctrine: its internal mobilisation discourse directed hostility toward the Islamist current more than toward the coup.
• Through a local proxy and at limited cost, Iran achieved what entire arsenals often fail to accomplish, turning geography into a deterrent instrument with greater impact and lower political cost than a nuclear weapon.
• The movement does not need to close the strait. It is enough for markets to believe that it can do so.
• The strategic defect in the Red Sea maritime-security system begins in Sana’a, rather than in Mokha, Dhubab, or Mayyun.
• The regional order remains molten and unsettled. Whenever states attempt to stabilise a balance, non-state networks move from below to test its resilience.
• If the Houthi experience succeeds in extracting recognition or a strategic gain, it will become an exportable model for non-state actors.
• Riyadh wants clear international cover before undertaking any large-scale ground operation and has yet to obtain it; this explains delayed action more convincingly than any lack of capability.
• For the first time in years, the movement faces simultaneous military pressure on several fronts, which partly explains the escalation of its rhetoric and operations.
• The question for Arab capitals is whether the Yemeni war will remain within Yemen’s borders or become a gateway for testing the entire regional order from its periphery.

A Strait without a Fleet

Since 3 September, Yemen has entered its most intense round of fighting since the collapse of the 2022 truce. The first phase ended in a development absent from virtually every assessment produced during the preceding three years: the Houthi movement returned to the southern Red Sea coast eight years after it had been driven out. Mokha and Dhubab fell, followed by al-Khawkhah and Hays, while Houthi control extended to the Hanish Islands and Mayyun Island at the centre of the strait. The operation, which carried an explicitly ideological name, added approximately 5,400 square kilometres to the movement’s area of control and placed its fighters less than forty kilometres from the largest US base in the Horn of Africa.[1]

These developments are commonly described as a Houthi victory and a defeat for the government. A more precise reading is that both sides changed their position in the balance without changing their underlying nature. A mountain-based movement inherited an exposed coastal strip without possessing a fleet capable of protecting it. Meanwhile, the internationally recognised authority lost coastline but acquired, for the first time in a decade, the logic of a unified operations room. The territory entered by the Houthis is flat; its supply lines extend for almost 300 kilometres through exposed areas, and its local social base is not naturally aligned with the movement. It is also the same territory the Houthis lost within weeks in 2017.[2] The gain is therefore essentially tactical. Whether it becomes strategic depends on the failure of their opponents to exploit its vulnerabilities.

Accumulated Causes and the Houthis’ Rise as a Regional Actor

The most common analytical error in reading Yemen is the search for a single cause. The Houthi arrival at Bab al-Mandeb resulted from a long accumulation of mistaken decisions and temporary alliances. The process began in the 1980s, when institutions associated with exporting the Iranian revolution opened channels with several Zaydi scholars in Saada, despite the historical tension between Zaydism and Twelver Shiism. In the 1990s, those contacts produced an educational and cultural organisation known as the Believing Youth Forum, together with a political extension that contested the 1993 and 1997 elections but secured only one or two seats in a parliament of more than 300 members.

That electoral failure was the first turning point. Political blockage and the absence of broad social acceptance pushed the movement toward armed organisation. Fighting erupted in Saada in 2004 and continued through six rounds until 2010. The movement’s founder was killed, and leadership passed within the same family according to a hierarchical and hereditary logic. Throughout those wars, the movement was treated as a domino in a domestic power game and was used in the regime’s struggles against military commanders viewed as potential rivals within an unfinished succession project.

The second turning point came with the Arab uprisings. The Houthis entered public squares, outwardly abandoned the language of arms, rejected the Gulf Initiative, and then participated in the National Dialogue Conference. Admitting an armed actor into a negotiating process without requiring disarmament enabled it to accumulate political legitimacy and military capability at the same time. This foundational error continues to impose costs on the region. The process ended on 21 September 2014 with the fall of Sana’a, achieved through an alliance with the same former president who had fought the movement in six wars.

The third turning point was the decade of the Arab coalition. A campaign intended to restore the state instead ended with fragmentation inside the recognised camp, conflicting agendas among its principal members, the proliferation of armed formations outside the Ministry of Defence, and the repeated removal of the government from Aden. The contradiction reached its peak last December with the UAE’s departure from the coalition and the reduction of its representation in the Presidential Leadership Council.

The fourth turning point was the 2022 truce. The movement used it to rebuild its forces and reorganise its military and intelligence structures under Iranian supervision, while the recognised authorities consumed their energies in internal disputes. The fifth came after 7 October. On the eve of that date, the movement faced a potential domestic explosion: a collapsing economy, unpaid salaries, repression of tribes and civil society, the militarisation of education, universities, and mosques, and demonstrations in Sana’a. Red Sea operations offered an ideal escape from this crisis by providing external legitimacy, regional momentum, and a moral cover for extensive recruitment campaigns targeting adolescents under the banner of supporting Gaza.

An Engineered Social Base and a Slowly Maturing Threat

There are no official and reliable statistics specifying the proportion of Zaydis within Yemen’s population, particularly in the northern highlands, which have historically and geographically been regarded as part of the Zaydi heartland. Belonging to this social and geographical environment does not necessarily imply adherence to the Zaydi school, and widely circulated estimates of the size of the Zaydi population remain uncertain. It is also important to distinguish between Zaydism as a religious tradition with deep geographical, social, and historical roots, and the Houthis as a political and ideological movement that emerged from the Zaydi tradition but pursues its own distinct project. The movement’s religious foundations rest on a particular interpretation of the imamate and the right of the Prophet’s descendants to political leadership and rule. Accordingly, the size of the Houthi movement within the broader Zaydi community cannot be determined with statistical precision. From this perspective, the Houthis may be described as a “minority within a minority” relative to Yemen’s total population, while emphasizing that this is an analytical characterization rather than a conclusion based on official statistics.

From 1962 to 2014, republican Yemen produced generations that had largely moved beyond practical sectarian classification. Religious curricula taught for more than half a century resembled comparative jurisprudence and drew on a longstanding Yemeni tradition of revival and renewal that prioritised evidence over closed sectarian affiliation. An entire generation grew up without knowing or emphasising its sectarian classification. Since the 1980s, the Houthi project has worked in the opposite direction, building closed educational incubators in remote regions and around the capital and raising young people on doctrines that clashed with official curricula and the country’s evolving social structure, until conflict erupted in 2004.

The deeper danger concerns the generation born after the takeover. Ten years are sufficient to shape a generation. A child who was one year old when Sana’a fell is now twelve, with a worldview formed inside a system that rewrote school curricula along sectarian lines, aligned mosque preaching with directed media and satellite broadcasting, turned summer camps into early mobilisation centres, and rewarded students with marks and certificates for periods of service on the front instead of sitting examinations.[3] The movement no longer merely recruits fighters from society; it produces them through its own institutions. This is why a short-term military response cannot address the most consequential aspect of the phenomenon: its transformation from an armed organisation into a long-term project of social engineering that threatens Yemen’s national fabric.

Three Blocs and an Absent Centre of Decision

Opposite this cohesive structure, the anti-Houthi camp is divided into three principal social and military blocs, each governed by a different logic.

The first is the Islamist current represented by the Yemeni Congregation for Reform, or Islah. The Houthi narrative that Islah has remained neutral and refused to fight is inaccurate and serves a psychological function. Islah has been both a central pillar of the war and one of its main targets. When the Yemeni army collapsed in 2015, the first resistance in Taiz, Aden, Marib, and Ibb consisted largely of young people from the party’s social base; they later formed the nucleus incorporated into the armed forces. Islah’s distinctive position has been its refusal to deploy as a party militia. It demanded that the state assume responsibility for confronting the takeover, an institutional commitment that also explains its confusion and withdrawal in Sana’a in late 2014.

The second bloc consists of Salafi-oriented formations, foremost among them the Giants Brigades, established with coalition support in 2016, and the Emergency Forces. Their commanders are Salafi, but their fighters come from tribes and regions across northern and southern Yemen, with a stronger southern character because their areas of deployment are under government control. These forces liberated the western coast in 2015 and 2016 and now constitute decisive military weight. Their structural problem is that, despite formal affiliation with the Ministry of Defence, they remain operationally, financially, and administratively autonomous.

The third bloc is the National Resistance on the western coast, formed in late 2017 after the killing of the former president and reorganised in early 2018. Built from remnants of the Republican Guard and young men motivated partly by economic need, it received advanced tactical weapons and was estimated at roughly 50,000 fighters, yet remained outside the Ministry of Defence system for eight years. Its central weakness is the absence of a clear combat doctrine. Internal mobilisation directed hostility toward the Islamist current more than toward the takeover, while deployment in Tihama coastal communities with which the formation had limited social ties left it isolated: heavily armed but without a social base, and formally disciplined but without a coherent doctrine.

Twenty Four Hours in Mokha and the Anatomy of Collapse

Popular Yemeni discourse explains the fall of Mokha in less than a day as treachery. Five factors offer a fuller explanation. First was the absence of a unified operations room: forces on the coast answered to at least three chains of command without a single operational plan or systematic intelligence sharing. Second was the doctrinal vacuum already described. Third was the absence of a local social base, which made withdrawal politically inexpensive. Fourth was the possibility of individual penetration among some officers, which cannot be dismissed but cannot be treated as the principal cause without a public investigation. Fifth was direct Iranian involvement. Several reports indicate that a senior Quds Force officer who has overseen the Yemen portfolio for years returned to Sana’a months earlier and personally managed the western-coast operation through a network of supervisors.[4] A senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader had earlier spoken of imminent ‘surprises’ in Yemen.

A sixth political factor deserves mention with an explicit methodological reservation. Houthi control of the coast coincided with the first high-level Iranian-Emirati meeting since the outbreak of the Iran war, held on the margins of the BRICS summit in New Delhi, and with language about turning the page after months of missile and drone attacks that exhausted the UAE and led it to suspend trade with Tehran.[5] The timing is circumstantial and merits observation, but it does not prove a bargain over the western coast. What can be stated more confidently is that Abu Dhabi had lost its formal influence over Yemen’s coasts since December and sought compensation through port projects in Berbera and Bosaso in the Horn of Africa, only for Mogadishu to cancel its agreements with the UAE early this year.[6] A state that has made control of ports a pillar of foreign policy is the clear loser when an armed actor reaches the strait, making the Emirati-Iranian bargain hypothesis logically weaker than it may appear politically.

Geography as a Functional Substitute for the Bomb

More than a decade ago, a former Yemeni president observed that if Iran reached Bab al-Mandeb through the Houthis while retaining influence over Hormuz, it would no longer need a nuclear bomb. Today, that statement describes an emerging reality. Through a local proxy and at limited cost, Iran has achieved what entire arsenals often cannot: it has turned geography into a deterrent instrument with greater impact and lower political cost than a nuclear weapon.

The figures clarify the equation. Around eight per cent of global oil trade and fifteen per cent of international trade pass through Bab al-Mandeb.[7] War-risk insurance premiums rose from roughly one to three per cent of a vessel’s hull value to between 7.5 and 10 per cent, bringing the cost of insuring a single tanker close to USD 21 million. The cost of shipping oil from the Gulf to China increased to around USD 78 per tonne, compared with a five-year average of USD 19. Vessel transits through Bab al-Mandeb fell by thirty per cent in a single day, while traffic through Hormuz dropped to only a few dozen ships, compared with 120 to 140 per day before the war.[8]

Operationally, the movement does not need to close the strait; it is enough for markets to believe that it can. Deterrence is produced by probability rather than action. Its cost to the threatening actor is minimal, while the cost imposed on its opponents can be enormous. This logic explains the announcement of a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia in July, its linkage to the closure of Sana’a airport, and the decision to keep the passage open to other flags. The message targeted Riyadh while carefully avoiding the simultaneous provocation of the entire international community.[9][10]

The strategic defect in the Red Sea maritime-security architecture therefore begins in Sana’a, rather than in Mokha, Dhubab, or Mayyun. Restoring the capital to state authority is the true key to energy and maritime security. Any approach confined to the coastline treats the symptom while leaving its source intact.

Testing the Periphery and a Regional Order Still in Formation

Timing is even more valuable than geography. Renewed Houthi pressure came as regional balances and alliances were being reordered: the Mecca Mutual Defence Agreement among Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey on 7 August, under which an attack on one party is treated as an attack on all,[11] and the maritime coalition announced on 30 July, which began operating in mid-August with fifteen states, including Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, and Bangladesh, under Saudi leadership.[12]

The region resembles a molten system that has not yet cooled into a stable mould. Whenever states attempt to establish a balance, non-state networks move from below to test its resilience. This is the effectiveness of the Iranian model: rather than testing regional arrangements at the centre, it tests them from the periphery – from Yemen, Iraq, and the Red Sea – at a cost far below that of direct confrontation among states.

The equation is structurally unequal. States possess borders, economies, cities, infrastructure, and development plans that must be protected. An armed non-state actor operates according to a different logic and offers fewer equivalent targets. Greater state military power does not necessarily produce greater freedom of action, which helps explain the apparent slowness of the Saudi response. The condition of statelessness has become an instrument in the balance of power among states.

The wider danger is that Houthi success in extracting recognition or strategic concessions would turn the experience into an exportable model. What is being tested at Bab al-Mandeb is the viability of an entire model for non-state actors, from the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan to any attempt to rebuild Hezbollah along Yemeni lines. Allowing this experiment to succeed, even partially, would be among the most dangerous characteristics of the emerging regional order.

The Actors’ Calculations

The US position remains the most ambiguous element. Maritime-protection operations led by Washington and London after 2023 lasted little more than a month before stopping abruptly. US classification of the movement shifted between designation as a terrorist organisation, removal, and redesignation. On 12 September, the US president stated that the Houthis had contacted him and asked Washington not to intervene, only two days after he reportedly rejected a Saudi request for direct air strikes.[13] More than one hundred US military advisers operate in Saudi Arabia alongside geospatial intelligence support, while Washington continues to avoid direct engagement.[14]

If a bargain exists, it is more plausibly US-Houthi than Emirati-Iranian. Three considerations support this assessment. Abu Dhabi would be among the largest losers from an arrangement granting Tehran and its allies leverage over a maritime corridor. The movement has long-standing Yemeni-American influence networks within Washington think tanks that can serve as unofficial channels to the West. Finally, an Arab-Islamic deterrence structure outside US leadership, such as the Mecca arrangement, would not serve Washington’s preference for remaining the central security provider. Under this reading, developments on the western coast carried a dual message: to Riyadh that alternatives to the US umbrella are costly, and to Tehran that room for manoeuvre remains.

Riyadh understands the scale of the loss. Saudi Arabia had enjoyed relative protection from a closure of Hormuz because it possessed an alternative route through the Red Sea. With Houthi access to Mayyun, it confronts a vulnerability similar to that of Gulf states facing the Arabian Gulf. Attacks have extended into Khamis Mushait, Abha, Jizan, and Najran, increasing the possibility that Saudi Arabia will move from indirect support toward broader military involvement.[15] Riyadh seeks clear international cover before a major ground operation and has not yet secured it. This explains delayed action more accurately than doubts about capability. The Houthis have also threatened to cancel the Jeddah border treaty and advanced a stark formula: allow them to rule Yemen north and south, or face renewed claims to extensive areas of southern Saudi Arabia.[16]

Internationally, China and Russia have aligned with Tehran, amid reports of satellite intelligence support to the Houthis for tracking maritime traffic and Chinese or Russian mediation offers. Moscow benefits from every front that draws US attention away from Ukraine; its mediation is therefore as much an instrument of influence as a peace initiative.

The Limits of Military Resolution and the Scenarios Ahead

The current round has nevertheless revealed a qualitative change in the performance of government forces. Major formations are operating under one plan within the Ministry of Defence and in coordination with Saudi Arabia. Air power has been reactivated, while fronts in al-Jawf, Marib, al-Bayda, and al-Dhale have opened alongside the coast, with advances toward al-Hazm and the capture of strategic positions after the government consolidated control over Hadramawt early this year. For the first time in years, the Houthis face simultaneous pressure on several fronts, which helps explain their higher level of escalation.

The essential deficiency remains air cover. The road connecting Taiz and Aden is the critical hinge: severing it would turn government-held territory into disconnected pockets, while securing it preserves territorial continuity. Safer remains a decisive economic asset in the east.[17] The humanitarian cost has already exceeded 100,000 displaced people within days, while thousands have crossed to Djibouti in a country already experiencing one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises and requiring more than USD 2 billion for its 2026 response plan.

Three scenarios govern the next phase. The first is sustained, coordinated government pressure toward al-Jawf and Sufyan while securing the western coast. This could cut the connection between Sana’a and Saada, reduce the movement’s capacity for smuggling and maritime supply, and return it to negotiations from a weaker position.

The second is a broader campaign toward the capital. This would require a qualitative change in the balance of power beyond current conditions and would raise the full force of the question of what comes next. Yemen would then need Arab sponsorship of an inclusive political process capable of preventing a new conflict from filling the vacuum.

The third is maritime containment: removing the movement from areas that allow it to threaten navigation while leaving it in its mountain stronghold. This is the least costly option militarily but the most expensive politically and in humanitarian terms. It would leave an armed ideological movement governing a large population, give it time to reorganise, and move the lines of war without ending the conflict.

The indicators separating these paths are observable: effective air cover for government forces; international political cover for Riyadh; movement by the maritime coalition from declarations to patrols and rules of engagement; the resilience of the Taiz-Aden route; practical activation of the Mecca arrangement rather than symbolic deterrence; and Tehran’s conduct if the movement suffers a major setback. The last is the most dangerous variable because a shift from indirect to direct confrontation would transform a Yemeni war into a wider regional conflict.

Conclusion

Any fragmentation of Yemen’s political geography would be followed by pressures on the geography of neighbouring states. Developments at Bab al-Mandeb go to the heart of Arab national security. They also directly affect Jordan because the operation of its ports and its trade routes depend on Red Sea security and because it belongs to the new maritime coalition. Jordan previously offered a humanitarian initiative to transport Yemeni passengers through its national carrier at the height of the closure of Sana’a airport; the movement rejected it, demonstrating how even humanitarian access has become a bargaining instrument.

Four conclusions follow. First, a purely security-centred approach focused on protecting corridors and supply chains may produce temporary calm while leaving the source of the threat intact. Yemen’s crisis is a crisis of the state, competing sub-state projects, political division, and accumulated grievances that remain unresolved.

Second, the movement need not be defeated militarily in order to end the threat. Depriving it of the positions that enable it to coerce international navigation may be sufficient to push it toward a fair political settlement.

Third, serious Arab mediation between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to reorder the Yemeni arena has become essential. The continuing divergence between their agendas has been one of the movement’s most important resources for a decade.

Fourth, no shift in the balance of power, whatever its scale, will become sustainable peace without addressing the structure of the state, political division, and economic collapse, and without a genuine reconciliatory process of transitional justice.

The question Arab capitals should ask today is not whether the Yemeni war will continue, but whether it will remain within Yemen’s borders or become a gateway for testing the entire regional order from its periphery. The answer is now being written in al-Jawf and Taiz and on both shores of a strait scarcely thirty kilometres wide.

References

1. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, ‘Expansion and Exposure: The Paradox of Houthi Control of Bab al-Mandeb,’ September 2026.

2. Ibid.

3. Manal Ghanem, ‘Curriculum Changes to Mold the Jihadis of Tomorrow,’ Yemen Peace Forum, Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, 5 November 2021; Justice 4 Yemen Pact, ‘Militarizing Summer: Houthi Use of Summer Camps for Child Recruitment and Indoctrination in Yemen,’ 20 May 2025.

4. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, ‘Expansion and Exposure.’

5. Lauren Morganbesser, ‘Iran and the UAE Meet in New Delhi,’ Semafor, 13 September 2026.

6. ‘Somalia Cancels All Agreements with the UAE, Including at Major Ports,’ Middle East Eye, 12 January 2026; Michael DeAngelo, Yale Ford, and Liam Karr, ‘Somalia Cancels UAE Agreements; Sudan-Pakistan Arms Deal,’ Critical Threats Project, 15 January 2026.

7. ‘Somalia Cancels All Agreements with the UAE’; DeAngelo, Ford, and Karr.

8. Sarah Shamim, ‘How Shipping Insurance Rates Are Rising, as Hormuz, Bab al-Mandeb Shut Down,’ Al Jazeera, 23 July 2026; Jonathan Saul and Michael Jones, ‘War Risk Insurance Costs Surge for Southern Red Sea Voyages After Houthi Attacks,’ Insurance Journal, 23 July 2026.

9. ‘Will the Houthi Declaration of a Blockade on Saudi Arabia Accelerate the War in Yemen?’ Al Jazeera Net, 20 July 2026.

10. ‘Treaty of Jeddah (2023)’; ‘Houthi Threats to Saudi Shipping Open a Front in the Red Sea,’ Al-Quds Al-Arabi, 2026.

11. ‘Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement: A Deterrence Alliance between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey,’ Al Jazeera Net, 7 August 2026.

12. Al Jazeera Staff, ‘Saudi Arabia Announces Start of Red Sea Defence Alliance: Will It Work?’ 14 August 2026; ‘Saudi Arabia Launches 14-Nation Coalition to Secure Red Sea Routes,’ AGBI, 30 July 2026.

13. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, ‘Expansion and Exposure.’

14. ‘Trump Says Houthis Asked US Not to Intervene in Yemen,’ Middle East Eye and Dawn, 12 September 2026.

15. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, ‘Expansion and Exposure.’

16. Al Jazeera Staff, ‘Saudi Arabia Announces Start of Red Sea Defence Alliance’; AGBI, ‘Saudi Arabia Launches 14-Nation Coalition.’

17. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, ‘Expansion and Exposure.’ 18. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ‘Yemen Humanitarian Crisis Deepens as Aid Agencies Appeal for US$2.16 Billion to Assist