The Houthi phenomenon manifests, in distilled form, the essence of Arabs’ defeats in building the modern state. The republic born of a military coup in 1962 was followed by a civil and regional war that lasted eight years and produced a regime whose hallmarks were corruption, patronage networks, alliances with tribes, and playing one tribe against another.
With the exception of a three-year period (1974 to 1977) that had witnessed an attempt to establish the state as an authority standing above communal groupings - an attempt that ended with the assassination of its architect, President Ibrahim al-Hamdi - Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled from 1978 to 2012.
Saleh was adept at managing and allocating influence, and developments over his long reign entrenched this foundational relationship between the state and communal groups, gradually making that relationship seem part of the natural order of things. And because war was always part of this trajectory, militiafication along sectarian and regional lines flourished.
The unification of the two Yemens in 1990 came after two wars between them, in 1972 and 1979. Indeed, unification itself would scarcely have occurred had the rule of the "comrades" in Aden not collapsed after their ferocious internecine war of 1986. Yet four years later, "unity" erupted into a North-South war, and it fared no better than the "republic".
In the Yemeni laboratory, four icons that radical Arab thought had exalted - not as achievements contingent on circumstances and human action, but as unquestionable miracles - collapsed at record speed. In the south, "national liberation" in 1967 failed to produce a condition superior, by any measure, to the colonial one. In the north, the "republic" ended in a system that recycled corruption and parceled out influence. Southern "socialism" then collapsed disastrously, despite all the clamor surrounding "working-class rule." Finally, in both north and south, "unity" met a tragic end whose consequences continued long after the 1994 war – one that ended in military victory without changing how power was exercised.
Like two sides of a coin, the Houthis and al-Qaeda flourished beneath the façade of a unified Yemen, becoming efficient instruments of fragmentation.
The Houthi project began in 1990-91, when Badr al-Din al-Houthi established the "Believing Youth Movement" in Saada. Between 2004 and 2010, the Houthis fought a succession of wars against Saleh's government, emerging stronger after each conflict. In 2014, they exploited the "Arab Spring" that had failed to take shape as a unified national project and, this time with Saleh's assistance, seized the capital and most of northwestern Yemen. The Houthis thereby effectively re-divided the country a quarter-century after its nominal unification.
National disintegration similarly manifests itself in al-Qaeda, which began with southern "mujahideen" returning from Afghanistan. Amid successive wars, and as the various parties - Saleh above all - found themselves compelled to strike temporary alliances with them, their numbers and influence grew.
In late 2000, as the Houthis were preparing for their wars, al-Qaeda openly revealed itself by bombing the American destroyer USS Cole in Aden, and Yemen became a base of operations for the terrorist organization. Later, through "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" and "Ansar al-Sharia," and through numerous spectacular acts of violence, Yemeni al-Qaeda produced internationally prominent figures such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Ibrahim al-Asiri. More important still, however, was the fact that al-Qaeda grew stronger and spread in areas that had once constituted the state of South Yemen.
If al-Qaeda's religious and sectarian extremism requires little explanation, Houthi extremism was fed by two steps commonly undertaken by movements of this kind. The first was the adoption of the most radical school of religious interpretation - in this case, the Jarudiyya, named after Abu al-Jarud al-Kufi, who, despite his association with Imam Zayd ibn Ali, departed from the latter's moderate position toward the Rightly Guided Caliphs and refused to recognize the imamate of Abu Bakr and Umar.
The second was an alignment with Iran that probably began a quarter-century ago. It was accompanied by the adoption of the name "Ansar Allah," expressions of sympathy for the doctrine of "velayat-e faqih", and an embrace of the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution: hostility toward the US and Israel and the cursing of Jews. When the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, Tehran discovered their strategic importance and enhanced the quality of the aid it had been providing them.
The Yemeni writer Mohammed Jumeh describes how militiafication, whose power to tempt the Iranians is beyond doubt, spread at that point:
"The institutions of the state collapsed, foremost among them the army, which had already been subjected to irregular restructuring and was extensively hollowed out (...) With the army disintegrating, the Houthis taking control of its leadership in Sanaa, and no protection against militia violence, every region or governorate in Yemen formed its own popular resistance. Names emerged such as the Marib Resistance, the Aden Resistance, the Taiz Resistance, the Sanaa Resistance, the Dhale Resistance, and the Tihama Resistance. Then came the National Resistance, the Southern Giants formations, and the various Elite forces, such as the Shabwani and the Hadrami, as well as the Security Belts. Regionally based armed formations emerged out of necessity, as a consequence of the army's collapse and the Houthis' seizure of its leadership and weapons."
Naturally, extended kinship networks remained the nucleus of a movement that ascribes a kind of sanctity to its leader, describing him as the "Banner of Guidance" and the "Companion of the Quran," and claiming that his command of religion and religious knowledge surpasses even that of the Prophet himself.
And yet these same people, having torn Yemen apart, are now "burning with longing to fight Israel in Lebanon," as a Hezbollah MP happily reassured us.
