How the Houthis Are Winning the Yemeni Civil War
By Matthew Parish
Monday 21 September 2026
There is something profoundly strange about the Yemeni Civil War. One of the poorest countries on earth has been the scene of one of the most technologically uneven wars of the twenty-first century. Saudi Arabia, fabulously wealthy, equipped with some of the most sophisticated American and European military equipment available and supported at various stages by an international coalition, intervened in Yemen in 2015 against an armed movement originating in the remote mountains of the country’s north. More than a decade later, it is the Houthis who hold Sana’a, dominate most of Yemen’s principal population centres and have recently expanded their control along the Red Sea coast towards one of the most strategically important maritime passages on earth.
The paradox becomes still more remarkable when one remembers where the Houthis came from. Ansar Allah, as the movement formally calls itself, developed during the 1990s from a Zaydi religious revivalist movement centred upon Saada in northern Yemen. Zaydism is an old and distinctive branch of Shi’a Islam, historically dominant amongst the ruling elites of northern Yemen but comparatively obscure outside the country. The movement that became the Houthis emerged partly in reaction to the spread of Saudi-supported Salafism and partly from resentment at the neglect of Yemen’s northern regions by the government in Sana’a. It subsequently fought six wars against the Yemeni state before exploiting the disintegration of central authority after the Arab Spring. In September 2014 the Houthis seized Sana’a. The event that was supposed to be their greatest gamble became the foundation of their state.
It would therefore be misleading to imagine today’s Houthis as merely a tribe of desert guerrillas. They have become something substantially more formidable: a revolutionary military government drawing upon tribal loyalties, religious ideology, captured institutions of the Yemeni state, remnants of Yemen’s former armed forces and technical assistance from Iran and Hezbollah. Estimates of their military strength vary enormously, which itself tells us something about the opacity of the organisation. What matters is that a movement once confined to Yemen’s northern mountains has acquired ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, coastal weapons and increasingly sophisticated intelligence capabilities. It has learned the principal lesson of asymmetric warfare: the weaker party need not become as powerful as its adversary. It need only make the adversary’s advantages prohibitively expensive to use.
That is what the Houthis have done to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi intervention of 2015 was conceived as a relatively straightforward operation to restore Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Instead it became an exhausting war of attrition. Air power could destroy buildings, weapons depots and military positions but it could not manufacture a legitimate Yemeni state. Nor could expensive precision weapons eliminate a movement deeply embedded in the political and social structures of northern Yemen. Every year that the Houthis survived was therefore a year in which the strategic arithmetic shifted in their favour.
The 2022 truce appeared to freeze that arithmetic. Large-scale ground fighting diminished substantially and the principal front lines remained broadly static for several years. Yet the absence of major territorial movement concealed an important political fact. The Houthis continued to govern Sana’a and territories containing the majority of Yemen’s population while their adversaries remained divided among competing southern, tribal, governmental and regional interests. Before the latest fighting, assessments commonly placed approximately one-third of Yemeni territory and around two-thirds or more of the population under Houthi government. In other words, the supposed rebels had already acquired the characteristics of the country’s principal state authority even though their government remained overwhelmingly unrecognised internationally.
The events of September 2026 have exposed just how unstable the resulting equilibrium was. Renewed fighting has produced a rapid Houthi advance along the southern Tihama. Houthi forces have taken Mocha and positions and islands commanding the approaches to Bab el-Mandeb, extending their reach along Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. Reuters reported that the movement had quietly assembled a force estimated by one diplomat at approximately 100,000 fighters before the offensive, while Saudi-backed forces were surprised by the scale and speed of the attack. Abandoned American- and Saudi-supplied equipment has reportedly fallen into Houthi hands.
This matters because Bab el-Mandeb is not merely another piece of Yemeni territory. It is the narrow gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Ships passing between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean must ordinarily pass through it. A movement that can threaten Bab el-Mandeb therefore possesses influence wildly disproportionate to Yemen’s economic weight. The Houthis have discovered that geography can compensate for poverty. A missile battery overlooking a maritime chokepoint may exercise more international leverage than an armoured division sitting harmlessly in a desert.
Their Red Sea campaign since 2023 demonstrated the principle. The Houthis attacked commercial shipping and fired missiles and drones towards Israel, presenting those operations as solidarity with the Palestinians. Whatever one thinks of that explanation, the strategic consequences were substantial. Shipping companies altered routes, naval forces were deployed and Western governments found themselves spending enormously expensive interceptor missiles against comparatively inexpensive drones and missiles launched by an armed movement in Yemen. The Houthis thereby internationalised themselves. They ceased to be merely one faction in an obscure civil war and became an actor capable of imposing costs upon global commerce.
Iran has plainly contributed to this transformation. Iranian weapons, components, training and technical assistance have materially increased Houthi capabilities, although describing the organisation simply as an Iranian proxy understates its indigenous origins and independent political interests. The movement existed before its relationship with Tehran became strategically important and its ambitions are rooted principally in Yemen. Iran nevertheless discovered in the Houthis an extraordinarily cost-effective partner. Relatively modest assistance helped turn an isolated Yemeni movement into an organisation capable of threatening Saudi infrastructure, Israeli territory and international shipping.
Yet Iranian assistance alone cannot explain Houthi success. Foreign patrons can provide weapons but they cannot easily manufacture cohesion. The more revealing explanation lies among the Houthis’ opponents. The anti-Houthi camp has repeatedly suffered from incompatible political objectives. Some factions want a unified Yemen. Others have sought southern independence. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have supported different Yemeni actors at different times. Tribal interests overlap imperfectly with ideological ones and nominal allies have sometimes fought one another. The internationally recognised Yemeni state has consequently struggled to become the sort of coherent political entity for which soldiers are prepared to fight indefinitely.
The latest collapse illustrates the problem. Reports surrounding the September offensive describe confusion, accusations of betrayal and serious failures of coordination among anti-Houthi forces. Whatever eventually emerges from investigations into the retreat, the broader pattern is familiar. The Houthis have one leadership, one ideological narrative and one overriding military purpose. Their opponents represent an assortment of purposes temporarily gathered beneath the banner of opposition to the Houthis. Military history repeatedly demonstrates that the difference matters.
There is also an uncomfortable lesson here about modern warfare. Western and Gulf military doctrine has often assumed that technological superiority eventually produces political success. Yemen suggests otherwise. Aircraft costing tens of millions of dollars can destroy a missile launcher but they cannot determine what replaces it. Intelligence satellites can locate military installations but they cannot reconcile rival Yemeni political factions. Precision-guided bombs can alter a battlefield without resolving the political circumstances that continually regenerate the battlefield.
The Houthis, conversely, have pursued something resembling the older logic of revolutionary warfare. They have survived. They have administered territory. They have mobilised populations. They have absorbed captured military resources and incorporated elements of the former Yemeni state. They have accepted extraordinary punishment without abandoning their political project. Their military technology has improved progressively while the willingness of outside powers to bear the costs of defeating them has diminished.
This distinction between capability and willingness is perhaps the most important feature of the war. Saudi Arabia possesses vastly greater conventional military resources than the Houthis. The United States possesses military capabilities beyond comparison with anything available in Yemen. Yet neither proposition answers the relevant strategic question. The question is how much blood, money, matériel and political risk an outside power is prepared to expend to determine who governs Sana’a. For the Houthis the answer is potentially everything, because Sana’a is their capital and Yemen is their country. For Washington, London or even Riyadh the calculation is necessarily different.
That asymmetry of commitment explains much of what otherwise seems inexplicable. A poorer force may defeat a richer one when the poorer force considers the struggle existential and the richer force considers it discretionary. Afghanistan demonstrated this repeatedly to the British, Soviets and Americans. Yemen itself has an equally long history of frustrating foreign intervention. Mountains, tribal networks, difficult logistics and weak central institutions create an environment in which outsiders may win battles while gradually losing their appetite for the war.
There remains an important qualification to saying that the Houthis are “winning”. Yemen does not resemble a conventional war in which victory will necessarily consist of tanks entering the enemy capital and a surrender document being signed. The Houthis already possess Sana’a. Their opponents retain important territories and Saudi Arabia retains overwhelming military capabilities. Fighting around Marib and elsewhere continues and the latest offensive has displaced well over 100,000 people. The humanitarian consequences of renewed warfare are severe in a country already devastated by more than a decade of conflict.
Nor does military success demonstrate that Houthi government is benign or broadly consensual. Reports by international organisations and governments have documented coercive governance, repression and strict ideological controls in Houthi-held areas. Military durability and political legitimacy are different concepts. A movement can be extraordinarily effective at surviving warfare without thereby resolving the immense problems of poverty, institutional weakness and political division that afflict Yemen.
Nevertheless, the transformation is extraordinary. A Zaydi revivalist movement from the mountains around Saada fought the Yemeni government, survived repeated attempts at destruction, captured the national capital, endured years of bombardment by a vastly richer coalition, acquired missiles and drones, challenged international shipping and has now expanded towards the Bab el-Mandeb. The internationally recognised government survives, but recognition by foreign ministries is not the same thing as effective sovereignty.
Therein lies one of the oldest lessons in international politics. States exist partly because other states recognise them, but they also exist because somebody collects taxes, commands armed men, controls roads, administers cities and possesses the capacity to punish those who disobey. The Houthis have accumulated many of those attributes while their adversaries have struggled to assemble them into a coherent alternative.
Yemen may therefore be witnessing the gradual transformation of an insurgency into something resembling a state, without any ceremonial moment at which the transformation becomes complete. The rebels captured the capital and then stayed there. They built institutions, accumulated weapons and waited while the coalition assembled against them fractured and tired. Now they possess leverage over one of the world’s principal maritime arteries.
The most remarkable feature of the Houthi story is consequently not that an obscure religious movement became unexpectedly powerful. History is full of obscure movements that became powerful. It is that almost every material measurement of power initially appeared to favour their enemies: money, aircraft, diplomatic recognition, international alliances and sophisticated weapons. Yet political cohesion, geography, patience and willingness to endure have proved capable of offsetting much of that advantage.
Whether the Houthis can translate their present military position into a durable political settlement remains uncertain. Their recent gains may be reversed, frozen or converted into bargaining leverage, and Yemen’s fragmented political landscape makes predictions particularly hazardous. But the trajectory of the war already illustrates a broader truth. Power is not simply the possession of superior weapons. It is the capacity to continue using whatever weapons one possesses after one’s adversaries have begun asking themselves why they are still fighting.
In Yemen, after more than a decade of war, the Houthis have repeatedly demonstrated precisely that capacity. Their opponents have repeatedly demonstrated how difficult it is to manufacture it.
