RIYADH: Yemeni and Gulf analyst Baraa Shiban recently returned from Taiz with a firsthand account of a conflict that has intensified after years of relative stalemate. He described artillery fire, children being killed and the effects of Houthi positions overlooking the city.
“I went to a hospital where children were being amputated,” Shiban told the Arab News current affairs program “Frankly Speaking.”
“I saw mothers who were basically holding their children following Houthi artillery.”
The latest fighting has pushed Yemen into its most serious escalation since the 2022 UN-brokered truce, with the Houthis launching a rapid offensive along the Red Sea coast, seizing the strategic port city of Mokha and advancing toward the Bab Al-Mandab Strait.
The offensive has also brought the Houthis into direct confrontation with Saudi Arabia and further internationalized a conflict that has long been shaped by the rivalry between Iran and its regional opponents.
But the militia now operating along Yemen’s western coast bears little resemblance to the movement that emerged from the mountains of northern Yemen more than two decades ago.
Shiban, who took part in Yemen’s National Dialogue and later left the country after speaking out against the Houthis, has witnessed much of that evolution firsthand.
Taiz, he said, has endured years of Houthi pressure from positions overlooking the city.
“The Houthis have placed snipers on the hills that are looking over the city,” he told “Frankly Speaking” host Katie Jensen.
The Houthis fought six rounds of war against the Yemeni government between 2004 and 2010. None of the later conflicts produced a decisive victory, he said, but the fighting helped shape the movement’s leadership and created a loyal inner circle around its leader, Abdul Malik Al-Houthi.
“It created that circle of loyalists, trustees, who have fought with him through that period, from 2004 until 2010,” Shiban said.
Then came the Arab uprisings. The upheaval in 2011 weakened the central government and diverted the country’s political factions toward an attempt to manage a difficult transition.
Shiban says the Houthis used that period to build their military capabilities while much of the political establishment focused on elections and the transition.
“All political parties, all the political factions were more focused on going through a political transition and reaching toward elections,” he said. “It was only the Houthis who were building the armaments, their capabilities.”
He also dates a major increase in Iranian involvement to the period after 2011.
“They found a strong backer, and that’s the IRGC in Iran,” Shiban said.
The Houthis, meanwhile, moved into Yemen’s formal political process, joining the National Dialogue Conference in 2013. Shiban was there.
There were participants who wanted the Houthis to surrender their weapons before entering the political process, he said. But the majority favored inclusion, not wishing “to put hurdles in front of the political discussions,” Shiban recalled.
Within months, the political process had given way to a military takeover.
The Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014 amid deep divisions within Yemen’s political and military establishment. Shiban attributes the speed of the takeover to a combination of Houthi organization, external assistance and Yemen’s internal fractures.
He also pointed to Hezbollah’s increasing involvement in Yemen and its foundational role.
“Hezbollah took two decades to get their structure together, but what they did with the Houthis is that they gave them the final product,” he said.
The Houthis further benefited from an unlikely alliance with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, Shiban said.
“They benefited from that alliance. They benefited from the fact that they broke the unity of the Yemeni military,” he said.
For Shiban, seeing the militia take control of Sanaa was one of the defining moments of the transformation.
“It was a devastating moment for the majority of Yemenis to see their capital being literally run by a militia overnight.”
The seizure of Sanaa was followed by a dramatic expansion in the Houthis’ military reach. The group that had once fought from the mountains of Saada now possesses ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as sophisticated drones.
Shiban is unequivocal about Iran’s role in that transformation.
“In terms of the unique capabilities, ballistic missiles, the ability to proliferate drones in this number, that would have not been possible without direct Iranian support,” he said.
“It would be impossible for the Houthis to achieve that on their own.”
At the same time, Shiban argues that describing the Houthis simply as an Iranian “proxy” risks overlooking the movement’s own ideology and decision-making.
The Houthis retain autonomy over day-to-day affairs in areas they control, he said, but that exists alongside a close ideological and military relationship with Tehran.
“The Houthis revere the Iranian revolution, the Iranian Islamic model,” Shiban said. “They see Hezbollah as a great example of Islamic resistance that they should copy.”
That relationship also helps explain the Houthis’ confrontation with Saudi Arabia.
Shiban says the attacks are intended not simply to strike the Kingdom militarily, but to change the political equation around Yemen by pushing Riyadh into dealing directly with the Houthis while sidelining other Yemeni factions.
“They want to force the Saudis into a position that they will have to only talk to them, (and) forget all the Yemeni factions that they are dealing with,” he said.
He also argues that the Houthis see Yemen’s place in the region through the prism of the “axis of resistance,” placing Saudi Arabia at the center of their regional calculations.
Saudi Arabia’s economic relationship with Yemen, Shiban added, stands in contrast to the Houthis’ relationship with Iran.
“One of the reasons why the Yemeni economy still remains afloat is because of the remittances that are being sent from those families into Yemen,” he said, referring to Yemenis living in Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, from Iran, “the only real investment was creating the smuggling network, weapons, ballistic missiles, drones and so on.”
The Red Sea has now become another front in that broader regional contest.
The Houthis’ capture of Mokha and subsequent seizure of territory and islands around the Bab Al-Mandab have given the group a far more strategically important position on Yemen’s coast than it held before the latest escalation.
Shiban argues that pressure around the strategic waterway serves two purposes — giving Iran additional leverage while allowing the Houthis to strengthen their position inside Yemen.
“What we are witnessing is the IRGC trying to make this war regional, trying to open new fronts inside Yemen,” he said.
But the militia’s power is not measured only by weapons and territory. Shiban has spent years documenting what he describes as the mechanics of Houthi rule — a parallel network of “supervisors” alongside neighborhood informants monitoring dissent.
“Their role is to basically monitor public employees, anyone who’s showing signs of dissent,” he said.
He also alleges that supervisors use taxation to extract revenue from businesses, while recruitment campaigns target schools, mosques and neighborhoods.
“They focus so much on the children because that’s when children are very vulnerable,” he said.
For Shiban, those pressures eventually forced him to leave Yemen himself.
He had remained in contact with Houthi figures he had known during the National Dialogue. When activists organized a peaceful protest in Sanaa following the Houthi takeover, Shiban said he was assured that the demonstration would pass without incident.
Instead, one of the organizers, a man named Salah, was abducted.
Shiban spent hours trying to find him, repeatedly contacting Houthi officials. Eventually, a senior official told him Salah was in hospital.
“What he didn’t tell me was that actually he was dead. They had been beating him all day,” he said, adding that his body was later dumped at the hospital.
The incident changed his understanding of the movement he had once dealt with across a negotiating table.
“I realized we’re dealing with a different group,” he said. “This is a different ball game. And that’s the one incident that just made me (conclude) I have to leave.”
He moved to Aden and soon left Yemen for the UK. More than a decade later, the conflict remains unresolved.
The latest escalation has brought the humanitarian consequences of that unresolved conflict back into focus. For Shiban, humanitarian relief is essential but cannot substitute for rebuilding the Yemeni state.
“Humanitarian need is just that. It’s humanitarian aid,” he said. “So, you’re just addressing the current situation, but you’re not resolving the situation long term. Yemen needs, even if it will take time, it will take a lot of work, it needs to reinstate its institutions.”
He also argues that the Houthis’ territorial control must be challenged if negotiations are to ever produce a lasting settlement.
“The Houthis will keep getting access to weaponry, recruits and revenue as long as they have territory,” he said.
“If there was any advice I would give to the international community, it is that it is time now to start supporting a unified Yemeni army and Yemeni state to reverse and make territorial gains, even if the ultimate aim is to reach a political resolution with the Houthis.”
He argues that the Houthis must believe their gains are being reversed before they will have a serious incentive to negotiate.
“They will not come to the table if they don’t see their gains are being reversed,” Shiban said. “(It is) only then that you can have a genuine peace plan.”
The Houthis’ history, in Shiban’s telling, is therefore not simply one of battlefield victories.
It is the story of a movement that survived multiple wars, exploited a failed political transition, benefited from Yemen’s divisions and developed the military support and regional alliances needed to become a force far beyond its original northern stronghold.
The latest escalation is another chapter in that history — one that has moved the Houthis from the mountains of northern Yemen to the shores of one of the world’s most strategically important waterways.
