Who are the Huthis, where did they come from, and where are they going? BuzzFeed News’ Gregory Johnsen reports.
Houthi Shiite Yemenis hold their weapons during a rally to show support for their comrades in Sanaa.
Hani Mohammed / Associated Press
The chants started in early 2002. "God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curses upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!"
Thirteen years ago they were just a few men, disaffected students and farmers, shouting outside a rural mosque in the north Yemeni highlands. Today, they are in charge. They're known popularly as the Huthis; the U.S. believes they are an Iranian proxy and Saudi Arabia has already fought one war with them.
On Friday the group, which now has at least several thousand supporters, dissolved Yemen's parliament and installed themselves as the country's new rulers. (They had already forced the president, prime minister, and cabinet to resign en masse two weeks ago.) A spokesman at the presidential palace, which is under Huthi control, said the group would form a five-member presidential council to rule the country for the next two years, and that the " supreme revolutionary council" would soon name a new 551-seat National Transition Council in accordance with today's constitutional decree.
The same group that has waged six brutal wars against the Yemeni state over the past decade is now the state.
This is the story of how the Huthis came to be, why the group was able to prosper as the rest of the country collapsed, and what that now means for Yemen, the region, and the U.S. campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the organization's most sophisticated and dangerous branch.
Then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih waves to supporters as he kicks off his presidential election campaign in 2006
Khaled Fazaa / Via AFP / Getty Images
It all goes back to a budget cut.
In 2000, Yemen's then-President Ali Abdullah Salih made one of his periodic changes to a discretionary fund that was known within his office as al-i'timad, or support. Salih used the money as a governing tool — when one rival got too strong, Salih would funnel money toward opponents as a way of keeping them in check without confronting them directly. It was part of what he called "dancing on the heads of snakes," staying ahead of his enemies by playing them off against one another. The process was crude and prone to fluctuation, but for years it worked. The strategy allowed Salih, who came to power on the heels of the brutal assassinations of his two immediate predecessors, to survive and, for awhile, even prosper.
In the mid-1990s, an Islamist political grouping called Islah, which included the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as tribal elements, had started to grow in power, taking control of a handful of key ministries. Salih, who had been funding the group off and on for years, withdrew his support and started funding their domestic enemies.
One of the beneficiaries of that shift was a member of parliament named Husayn al-Huthi, who came from a religious family that traced its roots back to the Prophet Muhammad and for years had been like local royalty. Studious and momentarily tired of politics, Huthi, 41, decided not to stand for re-election in 1997. Instead, he used Salih's money to study for a master's degree in Sudan. Three years later, in 2000, the political winds shifted again. Islah had been weakened, and Salih took Huthi off the payroll. With no stipend, Huthi had little choice. He withdrew from his program in Sudan and returned home.
Two years later, the chants started: "God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curses upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!"
On the day they started, in January 2002, Husayn al-Huthi stood in front of a group of supporters dressed in a long white robe offset by a dark sports jacket. Stocky and dark with a full beard and soft eyes, he had a commanding presence. Our community is under attack, he told his audience. Soon we will be no more.
The men in the square knew what he was talking about. For centuries families like the Huthis had supplied the imams who had ruled northern Yemen for more than 1,000 years. They were Zaydis, a Shiite offshoot that took their name from Muhammad's great-great grandson Zayd bin Ali. Adopting the flexibility of marginalized groups, Zaydis charted a sort of middle course between Sunni and Shia — they were fivers, both the unofficial fifth school of Sunni Islam and followers of the fifth imam in Shiite Islam. Through the centuries in Yemen they were almost indistinguishable from their lowland Sunni neighbors, save for the fact that Zaydis had an extra line in their call to prayer and held their hands differently. The two groups intermarried and prayed in each other's mosques. But a revolution in 1962 overthrew all that and abolished the Zaydi state. Instead of an imam, Yemen had a president and the ruling class of families like the Huthis suddenly found themselves powerless.
In early 2003, a year after the initial protests broke out, Salih passed through the region on his way to Saudi Arabia. Stopping for prayers, Huthi's men greeted him with more of their chants. Their chants saw them use popular frustration to both win local support and to implicitly criticize Salih. Muslims worldwide, they believed, were under attack from the U.S. and Israel, just as Zaydis in Yemen — the true Muslims — were under attack from Salih and his government. The Zaydi demonstrators denied this with wide-eyed innocence, claiming they were seeking only to "defend Islam." But what they were doing was obvious to everyone in Yemen, including Salih.
Huthi's eloquent, deeply religious speeches had tapped into a current of discontent in Yemen. A massively corrupt government, rising food prices, and high unemployment pushed people to action, and not just in their home region. Every Friday after prayers, Zaydi activists, inspired by Huthi and his followers, chanted outside the Great Mosque in Sanaa. Tucked deep inside the old city, Sanaa's oldest mosque, built by a companion of the prophet, was now a symbol of the resistance. And the movement was spreading fast. Throughout the mountain towns of north Yemen, men were repeating the chants.
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