At various times over the last decade, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Britain and Israel have carried out punishing air raids on Yemen’s Houthi rebels — only to see them grow even stronger.
Because the Houthis operate in a large and mountainous territory where they can disperse fighters and military infrastructure while threatening major oil infrastructure and key trade routes, that’s.
Iran and its allies in Lebanon and Iraq provide expertise, training and sophisticated weapons, according to the UN and other experts, and the Houthis’ hard-line ideology does the rest.
Even then, the Saudis feared the growth of a well-armed Iranian proxy on their border. Over the next seven years, Saudi Arabia carried out waves of airstrikes against the Houthis, often killing civilians. The following year, U.S. In the case of Yemen, the ground fighters opposed to the Houthis are deeply divided and fought each other as recently as January.
Saudi Arabia went to war against the Houthis in early 2015, after the rebels seized much of northern and central Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, from Yemen’s internationally recognised government. An array of Yemeni government forces and southern separatists struggled to push the Houthis back, and the battle lines moved little before a 2022 ceasefire. The U.S. and the U.K. launched waves of strikes against the Houthis beginning in January 2024. President Donald Trump ordered an intensified air campaign, with some 2,000 munitions dropped on over 1,000 targets, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press at the time. They include fighters loyal to the Saudi-backed government and southern separatists supported by the United Arab Emirates — a sometimes rival to the Saudis that withdrew from Yemen in 2019.
The following year, after the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Houthis began attacking Red Sea shipping in what they said was a blockade of Israel. “Yemen’s internationally recognised government is fragmented, weak, disunited, corrupt, and the Houthis have systematically been able to exploit that,” he said.
After weeks of U.S. strikes, the Houthis agreed to stop attacking American ships. But they continued to target Israel, which responded with its own strikes later in 2025, killing the Houthi prime minister along with other senior officials and repeatedly hitting a key port.
