The Houthis are routinely described as an Iranian proxy. The description has become even more common as their military reach has expanded from northern Yemen toward the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb. Iran has supplied weapons, training, intelligence and technical assistance that have greatly increased Houthi military capabilities. That relationship is real and important. But beginning the story of the Houthis with Iran turns their history upside down.

To understand who they are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. The Iran Primer’s account of the movement’s origins traces this history well before Iranian military assistance became important.

Zaydism itself is easily misunderstood when Yemen is squeezed into the familiar Sunni and Shi’a map of the Middle East. The Houthis are Shi’a, but they are not Twelver Shi’a like the religious establishment governing Iran. Zaydism has its own doctrines of religious authority and the imamate and, in important theological and legal respects, historically stood closer to Sunni traditions than Iranian Twelver Shiism. It is also deeply rooted in Yemen. Zaydi imams governed parts of the country for roughly a thousand years, and the last Zaydi led kingdom in North Yemen survived until 1962.

This makes the comparison with Hezbollah important. Hezbollah and the Iranian leadership share Twelver Shiism, and Iran was deeply involved in Hezbollah’s emergence in Lebanon. The Houthis have a different genealogy. Their religious tradition and leadership are Yemeni, and the movement existed before substantial Iranian military assistance arrived. The Council on Foreign Relations, while documenting extensive Iranian support, notes that many specialists regard the Houthis as an Iranian “informal partner” rather than simply a proxy.

Yemen’s history also warns against reducing the conflict to an ancient Sunni and Shi’a confrontation. In 1962, republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt intervened on the republican side, eventually sending tens of thousands of soldiers, while Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Sunni.

The alignment makes little sense through a purely sectarian lens. Sunni Egypt was fighting forces defending a Zaydi monarchy while Sunni Saudi Arabia was helping them. The struggle was entangled with the larger confrontation between Nasser’s revolutionary Arab nationalism and the conservative monarchies of the region.

Egypt soon discovered how difficult intervention in Yemen could become. Its military commitment became prolonged and costly. Historians still debate how much the Yemen campaign contributed to Egypt’s catastrophic performance against Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. Yemen alone cannot explain that defeat, but the commitment consumed enough military resources and attention that its effect on Egyptian preparedness remains an important historical question.

There is a striking irony in what happened later. Saudi Arabia, which had supported Zaydi fighters against Egypt in the 1960s, eventually found itself fighting another movement emerging from the same Zaydi north. The reversal alone should make us cautious about treating the Saudi Houthi conflict as primarily sectarian.

Much had changed in the intervening decades. The republican revolution dismantled the political system associated with the imamate. Zaydi elites lost much of their former position, northern communities experienced political and economic neglect, and Salafi religious institutions expanded into traditionally Zaydi areas.

Marieke Brandt’s history of the Houthi conflict is especially useful because she reconstructs these developments from inside northern Yemen rather than beginning with the later rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. She describes an environment in which Salafi expansion, Zaydi revival, tribal politics, economic neglect and political exclusion became increasingly entangled. Hussein al Houthi eventually became a figure capable of drawing together people who felt economically neglected, politically excluded and religiously marginalized.

Ahmed Nagi, a Yemeni scholar who has studied the movement closely, shows that Houthi expansion cannot simply be explained by Zaydi solidarity. Many Zaydis did not initially support them. The movement became increasingly adept at drawing upon different religious, political and social identities as circumstances changed.

Then the Yemeni state went to war with them. In 2004, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government attempted to suppress Hussein al Houthi and his followers. Hussein was killed, but the movement survived. Between 2004 and 2010, the government fought six rounds of war against the Houthis in and around Saada, with Saudi Arabia eventually entering the fighting directly as the conflict crossed its border.

Those wars transformed the movement. The Houthis acquired battlefield experience, commanders, weapons and organizational knowledge. They learned how the Yemeni military operated and how to survive against forces with greater conventional firepower. By the time Iranian assistance became substantial, they had already survived years of warfare against the Yemeni state and direct fighting with Saudi Arabia.

They also became politically adaptable. Nagi’s work shows how the Houthis shifted among appeals to Zaydi identity, tribal solidarity, political grievance, opposition to corruption and Yemeni nationalism. This helped them move beyond their original constituency and construct alliances that would once have appeared improbable.

The most striking was their alliance with Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president whose government had fought six wars against them. After Saleh’s removal during the Arab uprisings, his networks within Yemen’s military and political establishment combined with Houthi fighters and helped create the conditions in which Sana’a fell in 2014. The alliance eventually collapsed, and Houthi forces killed Saleh in 2017. By then, however, the movement controlled the capital and much of northern Yemen and had gained access to significant military resources of the Yemeni state.

Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in March 2015 as Houthi and allied forces expanded south. The imbalance in conventional power was enormous. Riyadh possessed modern combat aircraft, sophisticated imported weapons, enormous financial resources and powerful international partners. Yet years of war did not eliminate the Houthis.

Their opponents also remained divided. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cultivated different Yemeni allies, while the internationally recognized government’s authority fragmented. Foreign intervention gave the Houthis something else they could use politically: the ability to present a movement originating in northern Yemen as resistance to outside intervention. That message could reach Yemenis who did not share the movement’s Zaydi religious background.

This history should not romanticize the Houthis. Their political expansion and ability to mobilize people have existed alongside coercion, repression and increasingly centralized control. Resilience tells us how a movement survives. It does not tell us whether its rule is legitimate or humane.

It is only after this history that Iran properly moves toward the center of the story. Iranian military assistance grew as the Houthis themselves became stronger. Weapons, missile and drone technology, training, intelligence and technical expertise greatly expanded what they could do. Hezbollah also provided assistance. The Council on Foreign Relations’ examination of Iranian support makes clear how important this relationship became, particularly in allowing the Houthis to project force well beyond their original battlefield.

Without Iranian assistance, the Houthis would almost certainly possess considerably less sophisticated long range capabilities. But assistance, alignment and control are different things. Evidence of Iranian weapons, advisers or intelligence does not by itself answer the question of who makes Houthi political and military decisions.

A Brookings analysis devoted to the proxy question argues that the Houthis do not fit a rigorous definition of proxy because Tehran lacks control over their behavior. It points to occasions when Houthi decisions diverged from Iranian preferences. This does not diminish Iranian influence. It makes the degree of that influence something to investigate rather than assume.

The chronology is revealing. Iran encountered a movement rooted in a Yemeni religious tradition, hardened by six wars, possessing its own leadership and constituencies, capable of alliances with former enemies and eventually able to seize the capital. Iran did not create those foundations. It later helped transform the movement’s military capabilities.

The relationship benefited both sides. Iran acquired a partner capable of pressuring Saudi Arabia and projecting military force into the Red Sea without deploying an Iranian army to Yemen. The Houthis acquired weapons, technology and expertise that greatly expanded their reach. Their interests converged, but convergence does not establish command.

This distinction has become especially important at Bab el Mandeb. Houthi control of Yemeni territory around the strait gives the movement enormous strategic importance, while Iranian assistance increases its ability to exploit that geography. But it does not follow that Iran controls Bab el Mandeb.

Iran does not border Bab el Mandeb and does not exercise sovereignty over the Yemeni shore. The Houthis control Yemeni territory there. Iran can arm them, advise them, share intelligence and exercise influence over them without converting Houthi control into Iranian territorial control.

The distinction becomes clearer when Bab el Mandeb is compared with the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is itself a littoral state on Hormuz. Iranian territory lies directly along that waterway, and the Iranian state exercises sovereign authority from its own coastline. Bab el Mandeb is bordered by Yemen on the Arabian side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the African side. Iran is not a littoral state there.

Conflating the two straits therefore creates a geographical as well as a political problem. Iranian influence around Bab el Mandeb can be considerable without becoming Iranian control of the strait. To describe Houthi held territory as Iranian controlled territory assumes precisely what the proxy label is supposed to establish.

The strongest test of the relationship is therefore not whether Iranian weapons can be found in Yemen. They can. Nor is it whether Iran and the Houthis frequently have common adversaries. They do. The harder question arises when their interests do not coincide perfectly: who makes the final decision, and how much leverage does Iranian assistance give Tehran over that decision?

That is why Houthi behavior during wider regional confrontations deserves close attention. Decisions about when to fight, when to hold back and whom to attack may reveal more about the relationship than weapons inventories alone. Iranian support tells us a great deal about Houthi capabilities, but it does not automatically tell us who made a particular Houthi decision.

There is also an older history worth remembering. Egypt entered Yemen in the 1960s with overwhelming conventional superiority and became trapped in a costly war. Saudi Arabia entered another Yemeni war half a century later with vastly more sophisticated technology and discovered its own limitations. These were very different wars, but both warn against treating Yemen primarily as a stage on which stronger outside powers act.

As Brandt argues in her interior history of the conflict, concentrating on regional geopolitics can obscure the local forces that explain the conflict’s origins, persistence and expansion. The Houthis’ resilience emerged from that local history: Zaydi revivalism, political exclusion, tribal relationships, economic grievances, the Saada wars, captured military resources, fragmented opponents and the movement’s own ability to recruit, coerce, adapt and change alliances.

Iran later magnified that power enormously, especially its ability to project force beyond Yemen, but it did not manufacture it from nothing. This is why the term “Iranian proxy” needs to be questioned rather than merely qualified. Iran is an important military and political supporter of the Houthis, but support does not by itself establish control.

Calling the Houthis an Iranian proxy reverses the history because it begins with the relationship they developed with Tehran rather than with the Yemeni circumstances that produced them. It also encourages another leap, from Iranian support for the Houthis to Iranian control of territory the Houthis themselves hold. At Bab el Mandeb, that distinction is especially important. Iran has influence through a Yemeni movement, but Iran does not control the strait.

If we want to understand what is driving the Houthis, why they have survived and how they make decisions, Iran belongs prominently in the story. But it cannot substitute for Yemen itself. The story has to begin with the society, history and wars that produced the Houthis long before they became strategically useful to Tehran.

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