The rebels’ capture of Sana’a in 2014 spurred a military intervention by a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states—with intelligence, logistical, and munitions support from the U.S.—which aimed to defeat the Houthis. Its architect was Mohammed bin Salman, now Saudi Arabia’s de-facto leader, who, at the time, was serving as the defense minister. The Saudis, then mired in a regional cold war with Iran, viewed the Houthis as an Iranian proxy force that threatened the kingdom’s borders. Although the Houthis made no secret of their affinity for Iran—and their shared antipathy to Israel and the United States—the depth of their collaboration, for years, was a matter of debate, and the rebels were mostly seen to be acting in their own interests.
At the time, Yemen was divided by battle lines and ruled by feuding authorities: the Houthis in the north, and in the south the government that the rebels had expelled from Sana’a. Neither was capable of providing for citizens made desperate by endless war and endemic poverty, who were often left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the southern government enjoyed international recognition but was heavily under the sway of its Saudi backers. Years passed, and the Saudi-led coalition made little headway against the Houthis. Instead, their effort became known for a reckless and deadly air campaign that routinely killed civilians—including at weddings, at funerals, and in the factories where they worked. The strikes were often most vicious in the far north of Yemen, a rebel stronghold and the region where the Houthi movement had been founded, in the nineteen-nineties. The war immiserated Yemen. As a Saudi-imposed air and sea blockade contributed to disease outbreaks and famine-like conditions, the Houthis laid siege to cities and built a fiercely insular and repressive state, jailing critics and humanitarian workers. Then, in 2021, after years of criticism for its association with the Saudi war effort, the United States announced that it was ending all “support for offensive operations.” A United Nations-brokered truce the following year gave Yemen a period of relative calm.
The country did not stay quiet for long. In 2023, at the start of the war in Gaza, the Houthis, still in control of the most populated areas in Yemen, began attacking ships in the Red Sea, in solidarity, they said, with Palestinians. In 2025, during the American campaign against the Houthis, the U.S. military said that air strikes hit hundreds of targets, including weapons depots and air-defense systems. A tally by the nonprofit watchdog Airwars found that the campaign killed at least two hundred and twenty-four civilians. By the time that the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, there was an “interconnectedness between the Houthi strategy and the Iranian strategy,” Nagi said. The Houthis saw the attack as a blow not simply against Tehran but against “the whole of Axis of Resistance,” the constellation of Iranian-allied militias around the region, including in Lebanon and Iraq.
As the Houthis and Iran grew closer, another wartime partnership in Yemen, between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, was falling apart. The two Gulf powers—friends in the best of times but more often rivals—fell out spectacularly after Emirati-supported forces in Yemen, late last year, seized territory in two eastern provinces, including areas controlled by Saudi-backed groups. The U.A.E. announced that it was withdrawing its remaining troops in the country after the Saudis bombed an Emirati arms shipment bound for Yemen. Then, in July, whatever remained of the truce between the Saudis and the Houthis collapsed, after the Saudis, who control Yemen’s airspace, refused to let an Iranian airliner land at the airport in Sana’a. (The plane landed in the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeida instead.) “It was the spark of this crisis,” Nagi explained. And, as the conflict escalated, he said, the Houthis had to choose where to send their fighters next. One obvious option was the province of Marib, which, with its oil wealth, would give the rebels a powerful card to play as they sought concessions in any future negotiations with the Saudis and their allies in Yemen. Instead, they went to the coast, where their interests in controlling a major shipping bottleneck dovetailed with those of Iran. When the rebels barrelled south, they found they were pushing at a nearly open door.
