Bethan McKernan - Who are the Houthis and why are they fighting the Saudi coalition in Yemen?
The Saudi- and United
Arab Emirates-led coalition fighting in Yemen is under
unprecedented pressure from the international community to end its involvement
in the war after the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Since the coalition
intervened in 2015, Yemen has
become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Rights
groups say up to 56,000 people have been killed, half of the 28 million-strong
population are starving and the country is suffering the worst cholera epidemic
in modern history.
But who are the coalition
fighting, and why has the war descended into a stalemate? Yemen’s Houthi rebels
are a decades-old resistance movement, born in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s
religious influence. Although they cannot hold out forever against the
coalition’s air power and blockades, they say they are determined not to give
up.
The Houthi movement
was founded in the 1990s by Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a member of Yemen’s
Zaidi Shia minority, which makes up about one-third of the population. Hussein
was killed by Yemeni soldiers in 2004, and the group is now led by his brother
Abdul Malik. The Zaidis, once a
powerful force in north Yemen, were sidelined during the 1962-70 civil war and
then further alienated in the 1980s as Salafist Sunni ideals gained prominence
across the border in Saudi Arabia, which
exported the ideology to Yemen. In response, Zaidi clerics began to militarise
their followers against Riyadh and its allies.
The intermittent
insurgency gained support from Shia Yemenis fed up with the corruption and cruelty
of the long-time authoritarian president and Saudi ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
particularly during the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq… read
more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/21/who-are-the-houthis-fighting-the-saudi-led-coalition-in-yemen
