Apr 13, 2015

The war in Yemen is increasingly being construed as a Saudi contest with Iran. To ascertain the veracity of this oft-repeated conception, two things need to be clarified: whether the conflict is driven by sectarian dynamics and what Iran seeks in Yemen.

Yemen has long been the Afghanistan of the Arab world. Most Yemenis live below the poverty rate. The country sits on multiple fault lines, in addition to a long-running border dispute with Saudi Arabia. Following Arab Spring protests, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi came to power through a Gulf Cooperation Council-brokered one-man election, as opposition groups seized on power vacuums. The Houthis have in past months seized major urban centers in collaboration with their old foe (and Hadi’s predecessor) Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Experts on Yemen contend that the Houthis emerged as a Zaydi revivalist movement in response to Saudi-funded Salafist proselytizing in the 1990s. Claims that the group is sectarian and linked to Iran are long-running. Robert Worth, a fellow at the Wilson Center and former New York Times Middle East correspondent, told Al-Monitor, “The Houthis have been accused of being Iranian stooges almost since they were first founded.” However, these accusations have not attracted much credence. Worth, who has been on the ground in Yemen and is working on a book on the legacy of the Arab uprisings, said, “When I started reporting on them in 2007, this accusation was ridiculed by almost everyone — even by Yemeni officials, off the record.”

If there is a Saudi-Iranian contest in Yemen linked to the Houthis, its roots can be traced back to late 2009. As Saudi forces attacked border regions controlled by the Houthis, talk of the latter’s alleged Iranian connection reappeared — with force. The reason was clear, at least in Worth's view: “A ragtag militia had held out for months against the high-tech Saudi military, and even scored some humiliating punches against it. … Meanwhile, the Iranian media lionized the Houthis for their heroic 'resistance.'” US State Department cables published by WikiLeaks expressed skepticism of the Houthis' alleged connections to Iran at the time.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, an anonymous source close to Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam news channel confirmed that Iranian media coverage of the situation in Yemen first gained steam in earnest in late 2009, not during the 2011 Arab Spring protests. The latter is important to bear in mind, as the first credible reports of Iranian material assistance to the Houthis only started to surface around 2012. As Worth pointed out: “It’s important to add that Iran was not reaching out only to Houthis. I talked to members of the southern independence movement and some liberal political figures who'd been offered support from Iranian officials. … There is no indication that the Houthis take directions or even advice from Iran, despite many claims to the contrary.”