Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kirill Semenov
[REGNUM] On September 27, Arab news agencies reported the death of Bahraini soldiers operating as part of coalition forces on Saudi territory as a result of a drone attack by Yemeni Houthi rebels. Just a week has passed since the first direct negotiations between the Saudis and the Houthis, who rule northern Yemen and its capital Sanaa, ended on September 20 in Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact that the parties reported success in advancing the peace process in Yemen, the attack on coalition soldiers shows that the path to peace will be longer and more difficult. This is also a reason to think about the extent to which Tehran is able to control the Houthis from the Ansar Allah movement, or whether it still remains largely an independent player.
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THE HOUTHIS' INSIDIOUS ATTACK
In recent months, Saudi Arabia has stepped up diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, which has failed to produce a winner but has demonstrated the inability of the kingdom and its allies such as the UAE, Bahrain and many others to crush resistance from the Iran-backed Houthis.
A truce between the Arab coalition and Yemeni rebels has remained in place since April 2022. And although it was never extended, the parties still refrain from conducting active hostilities.
And in mid-September, the first official delegation of Yemeni rebels since the start of the war visited Saudi Arabia. The Ansar Allah (Houthis) mission was led by Magdi al-Mashat , chairman of the Supreme Political Council, and on the KSA side, Defense Minister Prince Khaled bin Salman , the brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, took part in the negotiations.
After five days of talks, Riyadh said it "welcomes the positive results of serious discussions regarding the development of a road map to support a peaceful path in Yemen."
But now, after the death of the Bahraini military, the official representative of the Saudi coalition, Brigadier General Turki al-Maliki, called the Houthi attack a “treasonous act of aggression.”
However, he left the door open for negotiations to continue, saying it was only carried out by " some Houthi elements ", adding that an electricity distribution station and a police station had also been attacked in the Saudi border region over the past month.
Maliki warned that acts of "repeated provocation are not consistent with the positive efforts being made to end the crisis and achieve a comprehensive political solution."
IRAN AND ANSAR ALLAH
The main unknown in this situation remains to what extent Iran is involved in these attacks or whether the Houthis themselves, on the contrary, decided to show independence and demonstrate that they are ready to resume hostilities at any time, regardless of the pressure Tehran puts on them.
Against this background, the Ansar Allah movement also held a military parade in Sana'a on September 21, where it demonstrated its weapons. These were, first of all, various ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missile systems and attack drones, behind whose Yemeni names well-known Iranian models were clearly guessed.
It is still unknown exactly how such weapons found their way into Houthi-held areas of Yemen, which are under a tight naval and land blockade. The most likely scenario is that Iranian parts will be shipped via small blockade-breaking fishing boats via Sudan and Eritrea. Then the Houthis assembled missiles and drones from them at their enterprises with the help of Iranian specialists.
It was through sending arms shipments that Iran largely made the Ansar Allah movement dependent on its own will. After exhausting their own arsenals, the Houthis could only carry out high-profile attacks on Saudi and Emirati strategic targets using Iranian drones and missiles. And it was these attacks that were most painfully perceived in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
Therefore, when the process of normalization of relations with the mediation of China began between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Riyadh put forward as its main demand an end to the Houthi attacks on Saudi territory. Iran had leverage to force Ansar Allah to comply with these demands.
Nevertheless, it is possible that now the Houthis could demonstrate that they are ready to resume attacks at any time, regardless of Tehran’s will, and that they must be dealt with as independent players.
Or, on the contrary, the “Houthi elements” most closely associated with Iran were involved in the attacks, as General Maliki could have hinted, thereby trying to convey the Iranian point of view that peace in Yemen is still impossible if Iran’s opinion is ignored.
It is important to note that the truce between Ansar Allah and the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia was concluded in April 2022, long before the Iranian-Saudi agreements on restoring ties were reached. And it is also not clear whether Iran played any role in this or whether the credit belongs exclusively to Arab intermediaries, such as Oman, who also have some influence on the Houthis.
"TRUE ZAYDIS"
There is still debate about Iran's role in the Yemen conflict.
In any case, one should not overestimate the degree of Tehran’s participation in the creation of Ansar Allah and its role in the Houthis’ decision-making. Although they depend on Iranian military and financial assistance, under other conditions they are ready to speak from their own positions. The negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Ansar Allah showed this.
Initially, Ansar Allah was an exclusively Yemeni religious organization that arose as a reaction, on the one hand, to the spread of Saudi schools of Islam, in other words, “Salafism” in Yemen, and on the other, to attempts to reform the traditional Zaydism for the northern regions of the country - an independent direction in Islam, which is considered a separate branch of Shiism.
Of course, this movement borrowed certain propaganda elements used by Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah, and began to consider itself part of the “axis of resistance” supervised by Tehran.
At the same time, Ansar Allah follows its own ideology, based on the traditional Yemeni religious school of the Zaydi Hadavis (on behalf of the first ruler of independent Muslim Yemen in the 10th century, the Zaydi Imam al-Hadi), which has fundamental differences from both Sunnism and Twelver Shiism (Imamism) widespread in Iran.
Thus, the Houthis advocated the preservation of Hadavitic Zaydism in Yemen in its original form and against the imposition, under the guise of rapprochement between Zaydism and Sunnism, of various forms of modernist movements, which were presented by the country’s authorities as “real Zaydism” (for example, this concerns the teachings of the Yemeni theologian Muhammad, who lived in the 19th century al-Shaukani ).
Similar trends towards promoting reformist versions of Zaydism began to appear in Yemen after the overthrow of the Zaydi Imamate there in 1962 and the creation of the Yemen Arab Republic. The new republican authorities were interested in transforming Zaydism in order to prevent the revival of the Imamate in the country - the only system of government acceptable for classical Zaydism.
Subsequently, Ansar Allah, after six wars with the government of the country and the events of the Arab Spring, turned into a broad front of various Yemeni forces, including some Yemeni Sunni groups. At the same time, the Houthis began to use a certain set of ideological guidelines developed by Khomeinist Iran, directed against the United States and Israel.
Thus, the Houthis tried to present their movement as a force focused on the fight against “Israeli Zionism” and “American imperialism,” and not just promoting purely Yemeni Zaydi narratives.
In this form, the Houthis came to power in most of the country in 2014, when they occupied the capital of the country, the city of Sanaa, expelling President Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi from there . Saudi Arabia, the UAE and a number of Arab states rushed to take the side of the ousted leader, starting a military intervention in the first months of 2015.
UAE AND SOUTH YEMEN
At the same time, besides Iran, there is another player who can “turn the table” on the Yemeni settlement.
This is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which, in fact, has become a third party to the Yemeni conflict, focusing on supporting the so-called Southern Transitional Council and its military wing - the Southern Resistance, which are considered separatist organizations seeking the secession of South Yemen, and fly the flag The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, which existed as an independent state from 1967 to 1993.
The UAE is trying to “obstruct” peace talks between the Houthis and the KSA, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported on September 26, citing sources briefed on the matter.
“Sana (i.e. the Houthis) fears that Abu Dhabi will push militants loyal to it (to fight) and prevent any peace agreement, because peace will deprive it of a significant role in southern Yemen and will not guarantee its interests in Yemeni ports, airports and "on the islands, especially Socotra," Ansar Allah sources said.
Against this background, relations between Saudi Arabia and the UAE are cooling, as Riyadh is trying to put pressure on those South Yemeni politicians on whom Abu Dhabi is banking so that they accept the Saudi settlement plan. This applies, for example, to Aidarus al-Zubaidi , chairman of the Southern Transitional Council (STC).
The fact is that Al-Zubaidi is also a representative of the united Yemeni government (the Governing Presidential Council), formed on the basis of the 2019 Riyadh Agreement, which included both representatives of the KSA-backed and UN-recognized government of Yemen, and the politics of South Yemen. This collective body replaced President Hadi as the country's leader.
In the summer of 2023, Al-Zubaidi stated that Yemen was divided into two parts: the North under the control of the Houthis, and the South under the control of the STC. Thus making it clear that the role of pro-Saudi forces is insignificant. In turn, Ansar Allah also made it clear that it would negotiate only with the “leader of the coalition,” meaning Saudi Arabia, and not the UAE and its “puppet” structures.
This, of course, complicates the search for compromises and makes any peaceful solution vulnerable: the UAE is not ready to be an outside observer of the peace process, especially given the contribution that Abu Dhabi made to the Yemen campaign.
Let us recall that the most successful military operations of the coalition - both against the Houthis and against al-Qaeda terrorists (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation) - in Yemen were carried out precisely under the leadership of the Emirates, and not Saudi Arabia.
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