Yemen’s Houthis undeterred by US campaign to end attacks in the Red Sea

The recent surge in Houthi activity has underscored the group’s ability to pose a persistent threat. It relies in part on a steady flow of Iranian weapons and expertise to withstand U.S. attacks and continue to attack. The faltering U.S. efforts to stop Houthi operations and protect global shipping have also drawn the attention of Congress, where lawmakers say not enough is being done to achieve deterrence.

“They have the ability to replace anything we destroy, and our ability to stop the import of war materials into the country is negligible,” said Gerald Feierstein, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen who now works as a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

For years, Iran has circumvented a United Nations arms embargo on Yemen by secretly shipping weapons and equipment from Iranian ports in the Arabian Sea or overland from neighboring Oman. The Houthis have also learned to modify old weapons and manufacture new ones. They are the first group to use anti-ship ballistic missiles against naval targets, according to senior U.S. military commanders.

“Their capabilities have definitely improved since they began their campaign,” Feierstein said. “So as long as they have an incentive to continue these attacks, they have shown that they are capable of doing so.”

The Houthi movement, whose leaders represent a Shiite minority in northern Yemen, first emerged in the 1990s and later captured the capital Sanaa in the chaos of the Arab Spring in 2014. They fought a bitter war with Saudi Arabia, which sought to eliminate an Iranian proxy on its border but ultimately remained in power and expanded the territory it controlled.

Experts estimate that the group has at least 20,000 members, including both tribesmen and former government soldiers.

In November, when the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, the Houthis announced they would begin attacking Israeli-affiliated vessels in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Their first major salvo was to hijack a cargo ship in the southern Red Sea and arrest its crew.

Since then, the Pentagon has recorded more than 190 attacks on American military or merchant vessels off the coast of Yemen, including nearly 100 since waves of American airstrikes began in January.

The Houthis have sunk two ships, including the Rubymar in March and the Greek coal carrier Tutor, which was hit in the stern by an explosive-laden surface vessel last week. Also in March, an anti-ship missile fired by the Houthis set the Barbados-flagged True Confidence on fire, killing three people.

Operations soon expanded to the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. From there, ships sail through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea, the shortest sea route between Europe and Asia.

But security threats led to a drastic decline in shipping traffic in the Red Sea, and by the end of March, traffic through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab el-Mandab had fallen by half, according to the World Bank.

The Houthis “will continue to understand that they must pay a price for damaging maritime trade in the region,” Pentagon spokesman Major General Patrick Ryder told reporters on Tuesday, calling the attacks “unacceptable.”

To counter the Houthis’ threat, the Pentagon is stationing warships in the region. The Pentagon is shooting down drones over the Red Sea and other waterways, and in Yemen it is attacking missiles and radar systems.

The deployments include an aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the destroyers and other warships that deploy with it. The Eisenhower deployed in October and its mission has been extended twice by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as the Pentagon makes maintaining firepower in the region a top priority.

But Republican lawmakers, some of whom are pushing for a dramatic increase in Pentagon spending next year, accused the Biden administration of underinvesting in the advanced weapons and surveillance technologies they say are necessary for the fight.

“We simply lack the political will to take action against them,” Senator Mike Rounds (RS-D), a member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, said in an interview Tuesday.

He attributed the increase in Houthi attacks to “resources being funneled to them by Iran” as well as “improved technologies that have made their systems more precise.”

“Each of the different types of systems has its own capabilities,” said Rounds, who declined to comment on specific weapons. “I don’t want to get into what the most significant is, but it’s more advanced than what they originally had,” he said.

In March, the US government said it would step up efforts to intercept the smuggling of Iranian weapons into Yemen. And on Monday, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said it had imposed sanctions on several individuals and companies involved in supplying weapons to the Houthis.

Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said U.S. destroyers and aircraft carriers in the region have been “quite successful” in thwarting attacks. U.S. forces have “used a lot of munitions protecting shipping,” he said.

“But if we don’t protect that transportation, we’re going to see increasing problems in the supply chain,” Kelly, a Marine veteran who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

He said he had just reviewed classified intelligence on the issue and could not comment in detail on efforts to stop Iranian arms sales to the Houthis. He acknowledged, however, that the Houthis continue to obtain advanced weapons from Iran.

“I think since they’re getting munitions from the Iranians, they believe it’s in their best interest to use them to create unrest in the Red Sea,” Kelly said.

The relative success of their campaign in the Red Sea has given the Houthis the flexibility to operate more easily in the region and at home.

“This is an attempt to show that the Houthis are a serious regional actor,” said Hannah Porter, a Yemen researcher at the ARK Group. a UK-based international development organization. After direct fighting with the US military, Porter said the Houthis “can now portray themselves as power players” and use that to increase their power domestically or in ongoing peace talks with Saudi Arabia.

This work is already underway on the ground in Yemen. Images from the conflict – including a video of the kidnapping in November and the rocket attacks on other ships — are being used by the Houthis for both recruitment campaigns and to crack down on dissidents, researchers and local media report. Houthis media have reported that tens of thousands more fighters have joined their ranks since the attacks in the Red Sea began.

“The Houthis are very adept at seizing opportunities to assert themselves,” says Nadwa al-Dawsari, a Yemeni researcher now based in the United States at the Middle East Institute. “And in this case, they are using the attacks in the Red Sea to prepare for an escalation in Yemen.”

Earlier this month, the Houthis, along with the United Nations and the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, began an intensified crackdown on the kidnapping of aid workers.

Dawsari said the arrests were aimed at wiping out small opposition groups in Houthis-controlled Yemen. “These voices have been suppressed, but now the Houthis want to eliminate them completely,” she said.

Lamothe and Hauslohner reported from Washington.