For the better part of a decade, there was an unspoken, yet heavily enforced, rule in Yemen against public support for the Houthis, a religious revivalist movement for the Zaydi form of Shia Islam largely unique to the north of the country, which fought a six-year war with the government. 

Sadah, the Houthis’ northern heartland, was devastated by the fighting between Houthi militias and government forces between 2004 and 2010. Hundreds of people are said to have been jailed indefinitely for promoting the Houthis behind closed doors.

The group’s fortunes have since changed dramatically, a point underscored on 23 September, when Abdelmalek al-Houthi, the movement’s leader, gave a speech broadcast on big-screen televisions in Tahrir Square in central Sanaa. Several thousand people gathered to watch, among them hardened fighters from the northern Houthi stronghold of Sadah. 

Targeting corruption

For many of the men from the north, whose darkened skin bore the scars of years of conflict, the speech marked the culmination of a campaign that began a decade earlier, when the movement’s founder and leader Hussain al-Houthi - Abdelmalek’s older brother - was shot and killed in Marran, his hometown in Sadah’s rocky interior. 

“We have come from Sadah, to punish the corrupt,” said one man, Hussein, as he and a group of his fellow fighters crossed the square a few hours before the speech was broadcast. He raised his fist in the air and started to chant the sarkha, the Houthis’ controversial slogan, coined by Hussain al-Houthi in the early 2000s, adapting the text from the “Death to America” of the Iranian Revolution. The men around him joined in: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

The men’s kalashnikov rifles were adorned with stickers embossed with the red and green text of the sarkha. Many who had come to hear Abdelmalek speak carried sarkhabanners. When, during the wait for their leader to appear, the supporters in the square took up the chant in one voice, it could be heard in Sanaa’s ancient Old City, half a kilometre away. 

Bold rebels

The Houthis, it is clear, no longer fear retribution from the state. 

On 21 September, Yemen’s government and representatives of its main political parties signed a peace deal with the Houthis after a month of escalating protests in Sanaa, followed by four days of intense violence between Houthi fighters, Sunni Islamist militias and an army unit loyal to Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the Houthis’ main adversary during the years of war in Sadah. 

By the time the deal was signed, the Houthis had seized the army unit’s headquarters in western Sanaa. Their rival militias had been told to stand down, as had the police and government paramilitary forces, by members of Islah, Yemen’s biggest Sunni Islamist political party, after President Abdrabbu Mansour al-Hadi had told them that he would not commit any more men to the fight. 

In previous weeks, Al-Hadi’s chiefs of staff had told him a war against the Houthis, hardened after a decade of conflict and bolstered by heavy weapons seized from the army, would be long, devastating, and could end with a Houthi military victory. Once the group had taken the military base, which housed about 90 tanks, they reassessed their position. A war would be unwinnable. Al-Hadi needed a deal, and fast. The Houthis, after weeks of prevarication, agreed to sign. 

As far as most Yemenis were concerned, the deal – brokered by the UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar – did little more than seal the Houthis’ place as the new preeminent power broker in the country. Under the deal, Al-Hadi would appoint a Houthi-selected adviser, who would help choose a new prime minister and cabinet, which would include Houthi representation. The deal also called for the Houthis to withdraw from the capital and from the northern provinces of Amran and Al-Jawf, over which the group had consolidated control during the previous year.

Tackling Al-Qaeda

But Abdelmalek’s broadcast in Tahrir Square, a victory speech in all but name, made it clear this would not happen, at least any time soon. “The People’s Committees will not go,” he said. “They will stay until the army is able to fight Al-Qaeda.” His words provoked a rousing cheer.

At a security cordon just outside the square, a man who called himself Hassan and carried a kalasnikov decorated with the sarkha prevaricated on the question of whether or not the Houthis now controlled Sanaa. “In truth,” he said, “we now control the country.”