Tribes and politics in Yemen: a history of the Houthi conflict
Marieke Brandt
Hurst, 2024, £20

THIS fine scholarly study of the wars in Yemen presents the local dynamics of society in Yemen’s north – Sa‘dah province and its nearby areas. The author is senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Her analysis focuses on the role of the region’s people in the implementation of policies, ideologies and religious doctrines. These people did not lead the overarching national debates, but they formulated the local agendas, shaped the reality of tribal, political and sectarian practice, and implemented these policies on the ground.

The eight-year civil war between republican and royalist forces, which ended the imamate and established the Yemen Arab Republic in 1962, triggered elite transformations in Sa‘dah, which were then cemented by the republican and Saudi regimes’ patronage politics. These distorted the functioning tribal order by increasing the political and economic power of the tribal leaders. 

The Sa‘dah region was neglected and underdeveloped, due to the republic’s class-ridden system, which made the local population utterly dissatisfied with the existing state. In consequence, after the mid-1980s, a resistance movement emerged and grew rapidly. This movement mobilised the people to demand civil rights, which neither the political parties, nor the sheikhs, nor civil society organisations could or would give them.

The Sa‘dah wars were not just a power struggle of local tribes, or a social revolution, or a sectarian war: they were all three at once. Together, they eventually led to the start of Yemen’s wars in 2004. Yet we are told that the conflict is just a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently, and poisonously, wrote that: “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.” (Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom”, January 30). He wrote that Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are like caterpillars in which this wasp lays its eggs, and those eggs are the “Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.”

The ever-expanding Sa‘dah wars of June 2004 to February 2010 started when President Saleh turned to sheer force to try to crush the powerful revolutionary movement that had arisen, directed against a ruling class that was the pillar of the republican order in Yemen’s north. The Saleh regime, motivated by class hatred and greed, refused to negotiate, rejecting the model of mediation of conflicts which had been part of Yemen’s model of good governance for several centuries.

From the start, Saleh accused the Houthis of depending on foreign powers, accusing Iran in particular of sponsoring the rebellion. But ironically, it was Saleh who depended on foreign support, from Saudi Arabia, when it intervened in November 2009, which saved his regime, for two years.

Saleh saw Saudi involvement in the war, and the accompanying increase in Saudi budget support, as an incentive to prolong the war, rather than seek to mediate an end to it. Likewise, the Saleh regime’s other strategic partner state, the US, armed and bankrolled the regime. The exact figures are a US state secret, but Saleh’s constant demands indicate that the support was significant.

The US-Yemeni military co-operation was very unpopular throughout the country, and even more so after the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Sa‘dah wars soon exhausted Yemen’s regular forces, so the Saleh regime increasingly relied on its US and UK-funded and trained counterterrorism units.

As Brandt notes, until 2009 Iran didn’t show much interest in the Houthis, and until 2011 there was virtually no evidence of Iranian military or financial aid to the Houthis. It made far more sense for Iran to maintain good relations with the Saleh regime than to support a movement that then had little prospect of actually overthrowing the regime, and that probably would not be subservient to Iran even if it did.
    
Saudi Arabia too pushed the claim that Iran was to blame. But as late as December 2009 — when the Saudis had already entered the war — the US embassy in Yemen reported that members of the Saudi government’s Special Office for Yemen Affairs were privately sceptical of claims of Iran’s involvement. One member was quoted as saying, “We know Saleh is lying about Iran, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.” And there was no hard evidence of Iranian involvement in Sa‘dah. 

The regime’s armed forces waged these wars with such brutality that the Houthi movement grew in size and fighting ability, gaining sympathy from those who were suffering. The indiscriminate violence of the armed forces, and their deployment of mercenaries from tribes external to the Sa‘dah region, led to massive enlistment among the tribes of Sa‘dah into the Houthi forces. 

In February 2010 the Houthis seized power in Sa‘dah, and then at the national level in September 2014 when they seized the capital Sana‘a. In response, in March 2015 a coalition of Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia began a bombing campaign in Yemen, “Operation Decisive Storm”, one of the deadliest and most indiscriminate assaults in the region’s history. Members of the British armed forces assisted the planning and organising the massive air raids.

This excellent study explains just why the Houthi movement has won so much popular support. It also situates the movement in its geographic context and makes clear its complex relations with the other states in the region.