CETRI
That history leads to another question. If Iran did not create the Houthis, what explains their extraordinary ability to challenge the militaries of Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States, as well as ships moving between Asia and Europe ?
A comparison with Hezbollah offers one way of answering it.
Hezbollah and the Houthis are routinely placed in the same category. Both receive Iranian assistance, both belong to what Tehran calls the Axis of Resistance, and Hezbollah members have helped train Houthi forces. But their histories and relationships with Iran are quite different.
Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran is deeper historically, institutionally and doctrinally. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards played an important role in Hezbollah’s emergence after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah and the Iranian religious establishment also belong to the same Twelver Shiite tradition and embrace the doctrine of velayat e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.
The Houthis emerged from a different religious and political history. They grew out of a Zaydi revival in northern Yemen, particularly around Saada. Zaydism is Shiite, but it is not Iranian Twelver Shiism. More importantly, the Houthis existed as an armed movement before substantial Iranian military involvement. They fought the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh in six wars between 2004 and 2010. By the time Yemen began to unravel after 2011, they already had leaders, fighters, territorial roots and years of experience surviving attempts by a conventionally stronger government to destroy them. The United States Institute of Peace’s account describes a movement that emerged from Yemen’s own politics and was subsequently sponsored by Iran.
Iran did not create the Houthis, but it helped transform them. Weapons, missile and drone technology, training and technical expertise greatly expanded their capabilities, while Hezbollah personnel provided training and advice. The Council on Foreign Relations documents the scale of this support while also distinguishing the Houthis from organizations Iran helped create.
Supplying and strengthening a movement, however, is not necessarily the same as commanding it. Iran reportedly advised the Houthis against taking Sana’a in 2014. They took it anyway. That episode does not tell us how every subsequent decision was made, but it is reason to investigate the relationship rather than assume its hierarchy.
The comparison with Hezbollah adds something my earlier essay did not explore : geography.
For decades Hezbollah had a relatively dependable territorial corridor connecting it to Iran. Weapons and equipment could move through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. Under Bashar al Assad, Syria was therefore more than an ally. It was Hezbollah’s strategic rear. Assad’s fall changed that. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem subsequently acknowledged the loss of the military supply route through Syria. The movement with the deeper ideological and institutional relationship with Tehran suddenly found itself more geographically isolated from it.
Lebanon has mountains, valleys, villages and underground infrastructure that Hezbollah has used effectively, but concealment is not the same as strategic depth. Lebanon is small and immediately adjacent to Israel. Israel has also repeatedly been willing to put its own soldiers into ground combat there. The Saudi led intervention in Yemen has relied much more heavily on Yemeni partners, Sudanese troops and airpower. That difference matters because asymmetric warfare is not simply about weapons. It is also about who must bear the human and political cost of using them.
The Houthis operate in a very different physical environment. Yemen is much larger than Lebanon, and its northern highlands provide concealment and defensive depth. Fighters can disperse, weapons can be hidden and positions abandoned and recovered. The Houthis learned to fight this way long before Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015.
Most importantly, they do not need another country to provide their strategic rear. Yemen itself performs that function.
Iranian supplies remain important, but they reach Yemen through dispersed maritime, overland and international procurement networks, with some assembly and modification taking place inside the country. There is no equivalent of Assad whose fall can suddenly remove the Houthis’ geographical depth.
Their recent mobilization shows how much of their power is also indigenous. Reuters reported that the Houthis quietly assembled roughly 100,000 fighters before their September advance without their opponents recognizing the scale of the buildup. Iran can provide technology, money, training and weapons. It cannot secretly import 100,000 Iranian soldiers into Yemen. A force of that size has to be recruited, organized, supplied and commanded overwhelmingly within Yemeni society. Sophisticated weapons reveal foreign assistance ; mass mobilization reveals indigenous capacity.
There is also a human geography to this war that disappears when Yemen is viewed mainly through the rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh. For generations, Yemenis crossed the border to work in the much wealthier Saudi economy. Their remittances supported families at home, but the relationship was profoundly unequal. Saudi Arabia was employer, neighbor and regional power at the same time.
The mass expulsions of Yemeni workers left deep scars. During the Gulf crisis of 1990 and 1991, Saudi Arabia expelled roughly 750,000 Yemenis after Yemen was perceived as siding with Iraq. More than two decades later came another mass deportation. Human Rights Watch reported that the International Organization for Migration counted 613,743 Yemeni workers deported between June 2013 and November 2014. Deportees described beatings, overcrowded detention, confiscated possessions and returning home without wages or belongings.
This history should not be confused with support for the Houthis. Many Yemenis who resent Saudi power bitterly oppose Houthi rule. But the Houthis did not have to invent resentment of Saudi Arabia. They inherited grievances that preceded both their relationship with Iran and the Saudi intervention of 2015.
The war gave those grievances new meaning. Saudi bombing, civilian deaths and destruction allowed a movement rooted in the Zaydi north to present itself in broader nationalist terms as resisting intervention by a vastly wealthier neighbor. People can oppose Saudi intervention and Houthi rule at the same time.
Manpower, after all, is not merely demographic. People need reasons to fight, and movements need narratives through which sacrifice can be understood. Iran can supply missile technology. It cannot manufacture generations of Yemeni experience with Saudi power.
None of this makes Houthi rule democratic or emancipatory. An authoritarian movement can mobilize genuine grievances against an external power while remaining coercive toward the population it governs. Ignoring those grievances because the movement receives Iranian assistance nevertheless leaves us with a poor explanation for its durability.
Yemen’s political fragmentation has helped as well. The Houthis face military formations, southern movements, tribal forces and political factions with competing visions of Yemen’s future. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have supported different Yemeni actors, while Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains another presence in an already fragmented landscape. Recent reporting by Reuters and the Associated Press suggests that the September Houthi advance exposed the weaknesses of their opponents as much as it demonstrated Houthi strength.
Saudi Arabia possesses vastly superior aircraft, surveillance systems, precision weapons and financial resources. But conventional superiority does not answer the hardest question in Yemen : who occupies the ground ?
Airpower can destroy infrastructure without eliminating an organization embedded in difficult terrain. A ground campaign requires roads and mountain passes to be secured, towns occupied and supply lines protected. Someone then has to govern whatever territory is captured. The Houthis do not have to defeat the Saudi army tank for tank. They can disperse, attack supply lines and wait.
Saudi Arabia knows the historical warning. Egypt entered North Yemen in 1962 and eventually committed tens of thousands of soldiers, only to become trapped fighting locally rooted opponents in difficult terrain. The war became known as “Nasser’s Vietnam.” The irony is that Saudi Arabia was then on the other side, helping Zaydi royalists resist the Egyptian backed republicans.
Riyadh also lacks one resource available during the intervention that began in 2015. Thousands of Sudanese soldiers fought in Yemen, including forces associated with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces. This allowed the Gulf states to shift part of the human cost of ground warfare onto forces from outside the Gulf. Sudan’s civil war has largely removed that reservoir of manpower while the Houthis have expanded theirs.
Saudi Arabia can bomb Yemen far more easily than it can occupy it. The Houthis do not necessarily have to defeat an invasion. They have to make occupation more expensive than Riyadh is prepared to tolerate.
But Yemen’s mountains explain only half of the asymmetry. The other half lies across the border.
Saudi wealth provides extraordinary military capabilities, but it also creates an extraordinary collection of fixed and valuable targets : oil fields, processing facilities, pipelines, refineries, ports, airports, electricity systems, desalination plants and cities. The country’s economic transformation increasingly depends on investment, tourism and an expectation of stability.
The Houthis do not have to destroy the Saudi economy. They have to demonstrate that they can threaten critical points within it. A relatively inexpensive drone does not have to defeat the Royal Saudi Air Force. It only has to reach a sufficiently valuable target, or force Riyadh to spend vastly more preventing it from doing so.
The recent attack on Saudi Arabia’s East West Pipeline illustrates the vulnerability, even though that strike was not attributed to the Houthis. The pipeline moves oil from the eastern producing areas to Yanbu on the Red Sea as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. As Hormuz became more dangerous, millions of barrels a day were redirected westward. An attack on the pipeline turned the alternative route itself into another vulnerability.
And even when the pipeline works perfectly, oil reaching Yanbu has escaped only one geographical problem. It has escaped Hormuz, not the Red Sea.
For cargo moving south toward Asian markets, the next problem is Bab el Mandeb. The strait compresses commercial shipping into a narrow maritime space between Yemen and Africa. Recent Houthi advances along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and around the mouth of the strait therefore matter far beyond Yemen.
The Hanish Islands make the geography especially striking. The 1998 Eritrea Yemen arbitration settled sovereignty over islands that had brought the two countries to war, leaving Yemeni and Eritrean sovereign territory in close proximity in the southern Red Sea. As the Yemeni side becomes more dangerous, the African side becomes more valuable.
Eritrea and Djibouti sit opposite this contested maritime space. Surveillance, logistics, emergency services and comparatively secure coastal infrastructure do not have to be located on the Yemeni side. Eritrean ports, islands and territorial waters consequently become more strategically important as insecurity grows across the water.
For Eritrea this creates opportunity and danger at the same time. Turning its territory into a platform for attacks on Yemen could expose its ports, airfields and islands to retaliation. Eritrea does not have to become a belligerent to become strategically important.
Egypt experiences the same geography from the other end of the Red Sea. The Suez Canal is an economic lifeline, but Cairo cannot guarantee its usefulness from Egyptian territory alone. If shipping companies decide that entering the Red Sea at Bab el Mandeb is too dangerous, a perfectly functioning canal more than a thousand miles north loses much of its value.
We have already seen this happen. Houthi attacks beginning in late 2023 pushed major shipping companies toward the Cape of Good Hope and deprived Egypt of billions of dollars in canal revenue. The Houthis did not have to attack Egypt or Suez. They only had to make navigation at the other end of the Red Sea dangerous enough to change the calculations of shipowners and insurers.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt therefore face different versions of the same geographical problem. Saudi Arabia increasingly needs the Red Sea when Hormuz becomes unreliable ; Egypt needs ships to keep entering it for Suez to remain economically valuable. Both problems converge at Bab el Mandeb, making the African shore impossible to ignore.
The chain is easy to miss when each crisis is treated separately. Pressure at Hormuz increases the value of the East West Pipeline and Yanbu. That makes secure Red Sea navigation more important just as Houthi power near Bab el Mandeb threatens it. The same threat can divert ships from Suez, while insecurity on the Yemeni shore raises the strategic value of Eritrea and Djibouti. The Red Sea’s two shores form a single strategic system.
This geography also helps explain American caution about becoming more deeply involved. The United States is already dealing with conflict around another chokepoint at Hormuz. Military superiority has not made securing that narrow passage simple or inexpensive. A direct confrontation at Bab el Mandeb could mean helping defend a second chokepoint while protecting Saudi infrastructure and confronting a movement that years of outside bombing have failed to eliminate.
The stronger powers also have more to defend. The United States has commitments across the region. Saudi Arabia has cities, oil installations, pipelines, airports, desalination plants and ports. Egypt depends on commercial traffic reaching Suez. The Houthis can concentrate their resources on a much narrower geographical problem.
This brings us back to Hezbollah. If Iranian sponsorship were the principal explanation for the power of both movements, we might expect the organization most closely integrated with Iran to enjoy the stronger strategic position. Yet Hezbollah, whose relationship with Tehran is deeper, has lost its Syrian rear and become geographically more constrained. The Houthis, whom Iran did not create, possess a much larger territorial base and potentially greater room for independent action.
That does not make the Houthis independent of Iran. Iranian assistance has made their military capabilities considerably more dangerous, and their interests often converge with Tehran’s. But convergence does not establish command, and assistance does not tell us who decides when interests diverge.
My earlier argument was that to understand the Houthis we have to begin with Yemen rather than Iran. The comparison with Hezbollah shows why this is more than a matter of getting the history right. Yemen itself is part of the explanation for Houthi power.
Its mountains provide strategic depth and its population provides fighters. Political fragmentation weakens its opponents, while the long and unequal relationship with Saudi Arabia provides grievances that can be mobilized. Across the border are some of the world’s most valuable energy installations ; offshore is one of its most important maritime chokepoints. Across that narrow waterway lies Africa, whose strategic importance increases as the Yemeni shore becomes more dangerous. Farther north, Egypt depends on ships passing through the same waterway before they can reach Suez.
Iran supplies capabilities that matter enormously. It did not create this geography, these historical memories or these vulnerabilities. The comparison with Hezbollah helps us see why all three matter in asymmetric war.
