The waves of the war between Israel and Hamas have reached the Red Sea. It is there that the Houthis, an extremist Shia-Islamist movement and Yemeni terrorist group, launched a series of attacks on commercial cargo ships and fired nearly daily ballistic missiles and suicide drones at Israel.
Most of the Houthi firings toward Israel were intercepted by Israel’s defense system or U.S. warships in the Red Sea. But the Houthi attacks on cargo ships headed to and from the Suez Canal attracted significant international attention and reaction. The U.S. is orchestrating an international naval task force to address the problem.
The Houthi attacks have forced some of the world’s biggest shipping and oil companies to redirect shipping routes around the Red Sea — one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes — resulting in delays and increased costs that could impact the global economy. Last week, U.S. Navy helicopters responded to a Houthi attack on a commercial cargo ship and sank three Houthi attack boats and killed the fighters on board. But the continuing Houthi threat to maritime movement through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal is a serious issue.
Who are the Houthis, and what do they want?
The Houthi movement is one side of the Yemen civil war that has raged for nearly a decade. The movement emerged in the 1990s as a religious revival movement for a subset of Shia Islam called Zaidism, which opposes radical Sunnism, particularly Wahhabi ideas from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has sponsored much of the opposition to the Houthis in the Yemen civil war. Iran has been the Houthis’ principal backer as part of its rivalry with Saudi Arabia.
The Houthis are one leg of what has been called the “Axis of Resistance” — an anti-Israel and anti-Western alliance of regional militias (Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis) backed by Iran. While Hamas does its dirty work from Gaza and Hezbollah from Lebanon, the Houthis plot their efforts from Yemen. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are next door to Israel and within close range for attacks and deadly missiles.
The Houthis are more than 1,000 miles away and largely lack the technology to cause Israel serious problems from afar. But off the coast of Yemen is the Bab-el-Mandeb straits which run to the Suez Canal in northern Egypt. Twelve percent of global trade, including 30% of global container traffic, flows through the Bab-el-Mandeb straits. And it is there that the Houthis are causing problems.
The Houthis say they will only back off from their Red Sea harassment when Israel allows unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza. But the Houthis will say and do whatever Iran tells them. And there is speculation that Iran fears it could lose influence in the region through a possible calming of tensions in Israel and Gaza as a result of international efforts and that raising tensions through mischief by the Houthis will give Iran greater leverage and regional influence.
The Houthis thus become another factor to be reckoned with as those seeking solutions to the Israel-Hamas war and other Middle East complexities navigate the ever-shifting puzzle of power, influence, war and peace in the boiling waters of the Middle East.
