April 18, 2025: The Arabian Peninsula, home of several wealthy Arab kingdoms that prosper on huge pools of petroleum underneath the desert sands. The only area with no oil is Yemen in the fertile south. Until the Persian Gulf oil industry was created over a century ago, Yemen was the most prosperous part of Arabia because it was green from Monsoon rains that soaked Yemen on their way to East Africa. The current head of the Houthi movement is 45 year old Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. Several of his predecessors were killed by Americans, Arabian or European attacks. The loss of so many Houthi leaders has not disrupted the violent activities of the Houthis and, with the aid of Iranian supplied missiles and drones against shipping in the Red Sea and an occasional missile attack on Israel. The Israeli missile defense system blocks the Houth attacks but the Houthis are satisfied that they are able to make such attacks. These attacks justify the hundred or million dollars in missiles and other military aid Iran has sent to the Houthis. In return the Houthis impose a brutal dictatorship over the twenty million people of northern Yemen. The Houthis see frequent violence as the most effective way to keep Yemeni civilians in line. The Houthis gradually seized control of all major businesses in Yemen. This plunder finances Houthis terrorist activities. Iran is broke but cab still supply lots of missiles, which have to be smuggled into Yemen by sea or overland from ports with bribable officials.

Western efforts to disrupt Houthi violence via assassination of Houthi leaders have failed. The Houthis clan is large and there are always replacements. At best, the assassination cause some disruption in Houthi operations. Opponents are dealing with a death cult that disregards the loss of Yemeni civilians and leaders so they can concentrate on attacking Israel and its allies. Few of these attacks do any damage and usually elicit retaliatory attacks that kill a lot of Houthis, Yemenis and any Iranians in the way. Any Yemenis or Iranians who protest this treatment are attacked and often killed by Houthi or Iranian forces. The Israeli/Western response is to kill as many Houthi supporters and Iranian allies as possible. This approach largely destroyed the Iran backed Hezbollah militia in 2024. Hezbollah still exists but was rendered ineffective for months and is still trying to rebuild. Disrupting Houthi finances and logistical operations are essential. Even terrorists have to be paid and there is so much oil wealth in the Persian Gulf that enough of it leaks to Islamic terrorist groups to keep the Houthis going. These lessons were learned by 18^th Century British colonial officials. Their counter-terrorism advice was to shoot on sight, shoot first and keep on shooting. In that respect the Islamic terrorists and their foreign opponents used the same tactics.

Yemen’s Shia rebels, led by the Houthi tribe, have used their large stockpile of Iranian missiles to block access to the Suez Canal. This capability developed over the last decade as the rebels launched attacks on more distant targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles fired from northern Yemen across Saudi territory to hit Saudi and United Arab Emirate/UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also acquired the reconnaissance capability to accurately fire missiles at ships passing through the narrow, 26 kilometers wide, Bab-el-Mandeb straits off southwestern Yemen and force ships to take the longer and more expensive and time consuming route around the southern tip of Africa. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source of income for Egypt, bringing in about $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make such an interdiction possible.

Western nations reacted slowly to this interdiction effort and only recently began attacking Yemen Shia rebel targets with warship missiles and air strikes. Western warships close to the Yemen shore used their defensive weapons to defeat attacks launched from the Yemen coast.

The war in Yemen drags on into 2025. Before the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Iran-backed militias in Lebanon, Iran was under widespread internal pressure from Iranians protesting the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Despite that, Iran smuggled in more and more weapons. These were not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war but for use against targets designated by Iran. At the same time Iran saw the growth of domestic uprising to deal with back home. The Iranian religious dictatorship held onto power and supported more violence against real or perceived enemies of Iran.

In early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Houthi Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing. Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to finalize unification. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since.

This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This concept of nationhood is still looked on with some suspicion. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate, or modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.

For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Houthis in the north. The Houthis have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam, a religious leader who was a Houthi. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962. Yemen also became the new headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula/ AQAP when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists after 2007. Now there is Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/ISIL and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which was very upset by Iranian/Houthi missile attacks. By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerate or even support AQAP and ISIL. The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf state, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Shia Houthi rebels were from northern Yemen and controlled the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last decade the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets and in later 2023 and into 2025 that violence escalated.