What the saudis, americans and british have done in Yemen is much worse than what the Ansar Allah has done. They're repressive for sure and they'll likely never agree with me on issues like queer people, but that's not unexpected after large amounts of colonial and later genocidal violence, it tends to see to it that only the hardest, least compromising people can survive and rise to leadership positions.
The yemeni army under the Sana'a government has managed to drive away US ships, so they very much try to kill americans that are there to protect US occupation and genocide. Eventually they'll likely get good at it, like they got good at building mobile radar systems and taking down MQ-9 drones.
* There is no unified government of Yemen, no central organization controls all Yemeni territory, Ansar Allah continues to fight for territorial control, particularly in Marib and around Taizz.
* There are no Americans in Yemen for Ansar Allah to fight, there are no Israelis there to fight, and the British haven't been in Aden for over 50 years.
* Ansar Allah adopted the Khomeinist "Death To America" chant to galvanize supporters for their Zaydi Rivalist movement, but their actual military targets are all Yemenis inside of Yemen. Far from unifying the different factions in the areas they control, they make government employees sign pledges to support the revival of the Imamate and its Sada caste system.
(also: an MQ-9 is a slow-moving turboprop)
You don't explain why Ansar Allah officials consistently claim they aren't a movement aiming for an imamate, why? The Saleh government used to say the Ansar Allah aimed for an imamate, but now Saleh and Islah are mostly allied with them. Did Saleh change his mind and now wants the imamate revival? Has the Islah party converted to zaydism?
There are quite a few americans in the Red Sea and probably the Gulf of Aden too. They see a lot of drones and other projectiles coming their way. The Ansar Allah has also fought, rather efficiently, Janjaweed soldiers employed by their neighbours. They also attack Israel, mainly what's currently known as Eilat and Tel Aviv. Yes, it's a repressive movement but it's pretty clear they at times militarily engage distinctly foreign troops.
Since they have sunni allies they clearly aren't fanatically sectarian either. It's likely they learned a lot from Hezbollah, which typically has allied with the christian fringe in Lebanon. I find it very hard to explain the decisions and policies of the Ansar Allah without seeing them through an anticolonial and antiimperialist lens.
"Death to America" isn't a specifically khomeinist slogan, though Khomeini did a lot to popularise it. The Ansar Allah expands on it, and for a mainly sunni hating movement it's surprising it doesn't mention sunnis, wouldn't you say?
Could you share a facsimile of such a pledge or similar source?
I find Isa Blumi's account quite well written: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/destroying-yemen/paper
https://www.saba.ye/storage/files/blog/1667842489_pTyQTA.pdf
You'll find 4o can translate this just fine, though several articles have also been written about it based on human translations.
I'm not so much interested in arguing with you about whether Ansar Allah seeks the revival of the Zaydi Imamate; this is pretty basic stuff. Your own source discusses it, but also: I'm not sure you can read any history of Ansar Allah, the Houthi family, Believing Youth, the Sa'da vs. Sanaa conflict, etc. without learning about this. When you read Blumi's account, keep in mind: the Zaydis are a minority in Yemen (I think they're even a minority in North Yemen.)
The body count inside of Yemen is into the hundreds of thousands. One super useful source on this is ACLED, which tracks raw conflict events around the world; they have an "Explorer" on their site that breaks battles and fatalities down by region and time (for lots of countries, not just Yemen). Dig into that, come back, and tell me the Houthis are fighting America and Israel.
The White House told Congress of boots on the ground in Yemen about a year ago (but the DoD walked that back).
I’d probably not try to argue there are no Israeli or American intelligence or military officers in Yemen.
Whether they are in range of Ansar Allah or qualify as an occupation force is probably a semantic argument where each side can reasonably claim honesty.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lucky-there-were-no-children-s...
The presence of Mossad spies who I have no knowledge of but I will just assume exist and are trying to find out where the Houthi leadership is or where the ballistic missiles are, so Israel can eliminate them, are an occupying force?
My point is just: Ansar Allah fields an army of roughly 200,000 (including the children). That army does not exist to fight Israel or the US (look at a map). What it's there to do is to take Marib, Taizz, and Aden, and to prevent the secession of South Yemen, which has become the stronghold of the ROYG-in-exile and hosts most of Yemen's extractive industry as well as its largest ports.
The basic idea of Khomeinism, which Ansar Allah proudly patterns itself on, is to institute a centralized authoritarian government managed by religious leaders while positioning the country against western imperialism (as a distraction from what's happening within the country). In Iran, this took the form of picking a gigantic fight with the US before losing a half million of its own people in a pointlessly prolonged fight with Iraq. In Yemen, it's a proclamation that Ansar Allah will liberate Palestine while murdering several hundred thousand Yemenis over the course of 12 years.
The current situation is pretty great for Iran. There's an open debate about how reliant Ansar Allah is on the IRGC QF, which creates some deniability. NATO is flying all sorts of stuff over and boating all sorts of stuff around Yemen, so Iran gets to use it as a playground for their new loitering munitions and anti-ship weapons, but with Yemenis pushing the buttons. If Ansar Allah actually managed to strike any kind of real blow against NATO or against Israel, my guess is that it would take less than a couple weeks for the aggrieved power to hit the Houthis so hard you'd need a HEPA filter to collect what would be left of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
Aside: for anybody not familiar with Socotra: it's an island out in the middle of the Arabian Sea, physically closer to Somalia than Yemen, notable mostly for being a sort of Galapagos of East Africa and a major tourist destination (even during the middle of the civil war, because it's not meaningfully integrated with Yemeni politics). Socotra does not matter.
Is the UK occupied by Russia due to the botched assassination of Sergei Skripal using Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018?
Is Pakistan occupied by the USA because of the US Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin-Laden in 2011?
I assume US special forces are present in many places from time to time if not continuously, although they are also continuously based in many countries.
I assume all serious countries have spies in every single other serious country. If you exclude small and poor countries, everyone occupies everyone? How is this definition useful in any way?
† Except maybe Socotra? See above.
But Socotra being de facto occupied by the UAE is pretty easy to surmise given the airbase they are building there and the lack of air power capability by the STC.
Given that Israeli or US troops at that base, even as advisors, could be considered occupying. It’s not like it’s a rigorously defined term.
Lots of people might have described Berlin as occupied during the Cold War (on either side) and it wouldn’t be out of bounds.
But it’s mostly not salient to the point you were making, which is the point I was trying to make. Whether there is some cadre US or Israeli soldiers in Yemen or if the UAE has built a base there doesn’t change the fact that it’s a civil war.
I clearly failed at redirecting the conversation…