Yemen crisis: Explained
The origins
The roots of the Houthi movement can be traced to “Believing Youth” (Muntada al-Shahabal-Mu’min), a Zaydi revivalist group founded by Hussein al-Houthi and his father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, in the early 1990s.
Badr al-Din was an influential Zaydi cleric in northern Yemen.
Inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the 1980s, Badr al-Din and his sons started building vast social
The Houthis are a large clan belonging to the Zaidi Shia sect, in Yemen’s northwestern Saada province.
The Houthi movement, officially called Ansar Allah (Supporters of God), began in the 1990s against the dictatorship of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Today, the Houthis are one faction in a bloody civil war that has raged in Yemen since 2014.
They currently control territory in the west and northwest of Yemen, including the capital Sana’a. They have waded into the