The Houthis firing missiles at Riyadh are not just Iranian proxies — they’re heirs to a 1,000-year-old Zaydi imamate that ruled northern Yemen on and off until the modern state was established in 1962. Zaydism holds that power belongs to the Prophet’s descendants, not elected officials. In an explainer video, Baraa Shiban, a RUSI fellow who sat on Yemen’s National Dialogue before being exiled for criticizing the group’s abuses, describes how, after a 1995 trip to Iran, the group’s founder, Hussein al-Houthi, fused the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam with Tehran’s revolutionary doctrine and built a militia in Hezbollah’s image. The group seized Sanaa in 2014, a decade after its founder was killed.
Rather than replace the state, the Houthis hollowed it out, Shiban said, assigning a “supervisor” to sit over every ministry and neighborhood, extorting businesses, indoctrinating the public, and recruiting children as soldiers. They now rule most of Yemen’s population and sit on one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.