The spokesperson of Yemen’s Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, recently announced Phase 4 of their military escalation against Israel and threatened to hit targets that “the Zionist enemy” has not yet thought to be possible. In conjunction with this, airstrikes have been repeatedly launched by the UK and U.S. fighter jets against sites across northern Yemen.
Yemen’s Ansar Allah has been propelled into the international spotlight since imposing a blockade in the Red Sea against Israel in an act of solidarity with Gaza during the ongoing war. Yet, we rarely hear directly from the group, known in the West as the “Houthi Rebels”, for its response to various allegations leveled at it and why it continues to fight on behalf of Palestinians.
In an exclusive interview with Mondoweiss, the Deputy Head of Ansar Allah’s Media Authority, Nasr al-Din Amer, says the Yemeni political movement’s goal “is to liberate our country from external occupation and end all types of external interference and domination.” He also stressed that the actions taken by his movement, on behalf of the Palestinian people in Gaza, are rooted in a popular demand from the Yemeni people and in Islamic morals.
A war for Gaza
On October 19, Yemen’s armed forces announced that they were joining the war between Gaza and Israel, firing a batch of drones and missiles toward the Israeli-operated Port of Eilat. A month later, on November 19, Yemeni naval forces boarded a shipping vessel in the Red Sea, announcing that it would be imposing a blockade on Israeli-linked ships passing through these territorial waters. It wouldn’t be long until Ansar Allah would declare that all trade to Israel was to be blocked until the war on Gaza ended, prompting the U.S., UK, and other allied nations to mount a military campaign aimed at allowing the passage of ships to Israel.
Given that Ansar Allah has publicly condemned what Israeli rights group B’Tselem now calls a “manufactured famine” in Gaza, I asked what role the siege and war against Yemen had played in the preparation for their military actions in support of starving Palestinians, to which Amer responded:
“There is no doubt that military capabilities were formed and developed over the years under iron, fire, war, and siege, and were developed according to the requirements of need, threats, and risks. Since our country has an important strategic location and a unique maritime position, the leadership was placing exceptional emphasis on developing naval capabilities to suit the threats and risks and the size of foreign ambitions.” He also emphasized “the position the Palestinian issue occupies in our literature and our intellectual and political culture.”
“The leadership in Yemen was preparing for such scenarios, in which Yemen would play its prominent and pivotal role in supporting the Palestinian cause, and this was evident in our recent operations in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab, the Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea, all the way to the Indian Ocean. The naval forces, the missile force, and the unmanned air [drone] force, thanks to God and His help, had the upper hand in this region and in this battle in which the Americans and the Western forces were defeated and defeated again,” he continued.
Nasr al-Din Amer also gave his take on the little-focused issue of the current Israeli-Emirati occupation of Yemen’s Socotra Island, which could threaten an even broader expansion of the current round of fighting.
“We consider any area in our country in which foreign forces or their tools are present, whether on land, sea, or islands, to be an occupied area, and we are committed to liberating it to the last inch,” he stated. “We are not oblivious to what is happening there, and at the appropriate time, we will take the necessary measures regarding it.”
In the eyes of the West’s leadership, the Yemeni blockade imposed in the Red Sea is a violation of international law, which is the argument given as to why Western military intervention is justified. When I put this point to the Ansar Allah official, he answered with the following:
“In American and British conceptions, the law is what justifies and formulates their hegemony over the world, even if it is not moral. However, our operations at sea are consistent with what is demanded by most countries in the world, who are demanding an end to the aggression and the lifting of the siege on Gaza, while the Americans and the British stand in the shameful position that is contrary to what the world is calling for, and therefore they have no right to talk about the law at all.”
“We believe that the famine currently occurring in Gaza is sufficient to provoke the feelings of the entire world, and therefore we are working day and night to develop and expand our operations to lift this injustice and stop these crimes against the people of Gaza,” he added.
“The extent of the oppression of the Palestinian people, which is unparalleled in the world at the present time, requires us to do everything we can to support them and stop this oppression,” he said. “This is part of our religion, our belief, and our humanity as well. What is strange are the positions of others who are silent and negligent and not our religious, moral, and humanitarian positions.”
Revolutionary resistance movement or foreign proxy?
The dominant Western narrative to describe Ansar Allah as a military, political, and social group is a key component in justifying military action against it. In January, the Biden administration re-designated the movement as a terrorist organization in the United States, apparently due to the group’s aggression against Israel. As the possibility of a wider U.S.-led military campaign in Yemen becomes more likely, understanding the popularly adopted rhetoric used across Western media to describe the Yemeni movement is ever more important.
When I asked Nasr al-Din Amer his thoughts on the West’s portrayal of the group as “Houthi rebels” who do not represent a legitimate governing force in Yemen, he replied:
“The West deliberately and politically distorts any liberation movement in any country in the world, especially in the East, in several ways, including portraying this movement as barbaric, chaotic, or functional for the benefit of other powers, as if there are no living peoples with ambitions, projects, and real suffering, especially when this movement is anti-hegemonic.”
He stressed that “Our movement and revolution is a liberation movement that stems from the deep-rooted identity of our people and is not strange or alien. This is why it withstood the American and Western attack and the aggression carried out by regimes subordinate to America and the West, but it failed in the face of the deep awareness and firm faith of our people.” He refers here to the aggression carried out against Ansar Allah during the recent direct attacks by the U.S.-led multinational coalition under “Operation Prosperity Guardian” in the Red Sea and the Saudi-led coalition war on Yemen since 2015 (with U.S. and UK backing).
“Sufficient evidence that this movement is not an extension of any external force is that it would have fallen before this alliance, which has power, money, and many agents,” he maintained. “We have in Yemen a government composed of various political forces and parties inside the country since the year 2016. It has been running the country in its various affairs. It is a stable government despite the aggression and siege. It governs and provides services to more than 70% of the population and the largest number of governorates, and imposes the kind of security and stability that the country has not witnessed for decades, despite the war. The [governing] list has been in place since 2015, in contrast to the occupied areas [outside of Ansar Allah control], which are witnessing complete chaos, ongoing internecine fighting, and a deteriorating economic situation, where the exchange rate difference between the local currency and the U.S. dollar reaches three times the amount compared to the areas governed by the Sana’a government.”
“As for our relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is our peer. It is an official and declared relationship, and not a subservient relationship or a relationship with a satanic state, as the Western media portrays it,” he said, addressing the accusations that Ansar Allah is an Iranian proxy. “Iran is a brotherly Islamic country that has honorable positions towards our country and our people and has not carried out any aggressive action against our people. Therefore, we do not see it as the Western media wants, and we will not be hostile to it.”
On the origin of the movement, he stated that it must be placed in a timeline as an extension of “the Quranic journey,” sharing that “it can be said that the martyred leader, Sayyid Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, may God be pleased with him, moved with a revival project to reconnect people with the Qur’an as a source of guidance in various affairs and aspects of life, and he began this clearly in lessons and lectures to provide this project for the people in the year 2002.”
In 2011, in light of the broader popular protests and revolutions that swept the Arab world, Ansar Allah protested alongside various opposition groups in Yemen and called for the overthrow of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Following what is known as the September 21 Revolution of 2014, the movement would eventually depose Saleh’s successor, President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, who would flee from Sana’a to Aden, and then on to Saudi Arabia. While Hadi continued to lead what the United Nations still considered to be the “internationally recognized government,” he was widely viewed inside Yemen as a puppet of Riyadh, which had formed a multi-national coalition to support its war effort, aimed at restoring power to the deposed President Hadi.
Road to power and conflict with Israel
I asked what motivated the revolutionaries and Ansar Allah’s role in the September 21 Revolution back in 2014, to which I was told that “Yemen lived in a state of subjugation and the alienation of decision-making. It was under a rule resembling an occupation through foreign embassies. This situation was not limited to the authorities [in power] but extended to most of the opposition parties. Yemen lived through a bitter experience in the year 2011, when people took to the streets to demand change and get rid of the regime controlled by the outside world.”
“Most of the opposition parties participated with them [the revolutionaries in 2011], but that movement ended in a deal that came from abroad under the title of the Gulf Initiative,” Nasr al-Din said. Those authorities in power and the opposition parties were both party to the initiative, which “returned matters to the realm of external guardianship even more than before.” This “caused the masses to lose confidence in the opposition parties,” Nasr al-Din Amer maintained.
“On the other hand, Ansar Allah had a different position [that was] biased towards the aspirations of the people,” he continued. “In getting rid of external tutelage, which prompted the Yemeni people to rally around Ansar Allah, the revolutionary action continued in a faint manner until it took an upward curve in the year 2014 when the situation became unbearable.”
He shared that the instability inside the country had reached a breaking point.
“Explosions, bombs, and assassinations occurred inside the Ministry of Defense in the capital, Sana’a, which was stormed by Al-Qaeda,” he explained. “The assassinations of army and security officers were a common scene.” This, Amer says, is what culminated in the revolution “led by Commander Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi,” and that it “came as a lifeline from that tragic situation, and the free Yemeni people from various segments and movements rallied around it.”
The Ansar Allah official expressed his view that the revolution had represented a major blow to both the U.S. and Israeli governments, “a major challenge to American hegemony over Yemen and the entire region and a threat to the Zionist project, as the Prime Minister of the Zionist enemy, Netanyahu, spoke at the time about the September 21 revolution and considered it a threat to his entity.”
It is clear that the Yemeni movement sees the culprits behind the war and siege imposed on their country, which has led to the deaths of almost 400,000 people and one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, as a U.S.-UK-Israeli imperialist plot. He went on to say that “the Zionist aggression against our country is indeed an extension of the American strategy to dominate the region.”
