Iran's pragmatic policy of controlling proxies

Yemen's Houthis, far from being a local movement, are a core, organic component of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and always have been. Indeed, for the first time since 1979, Iran has managed to replicate itself fully without being bound by any democratic strictures or existing dictatorships as in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, marking the Houthis as Iran’s most successful revolutionary experiment to date.

The Houthis, in this conception, are not the Zaydis, but are in fact a neo-Twelver core carved out of the Zaydi Revival movement, cultivated since 1979, and acting entirely under Iran’s command and control.

The relationship between the Houthi movement (Ansarallah) and the IRGC dates back to 1979, when leaders of the Yemeni Shias from the Houthi tribe visited Iran to congratulate Khomeini on the creation of an Islamist state. During the 1980s, some Houthi leaders studied Iran’s militant brand of Shiism in the Qom seminary in the hope that they could emulate the methods used in Iran’s Islamic Revolution at home in Yemen.

The Arab Spring protests sweeping the Middle East caused yet another regional upheaval akin to 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the broader global war on terror. Coinciding with the full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and very sympathetic gestures from the Obama administration, Iran decided the time was finally right to officially establish Hezbollah in Yemen.

This marked a shift in Iran’s role from being a hidden marginal ally into a power at the forefront. That influence not only manifested in Iran’s alliance with a non-state group (the Houthis), but also in an alliance with the Yemeni state itself, which by that point, the Houthis had controlled by armed force.

The number of unjustified routine flights raised many eyebrows regarding the nature of such flights and the content of their cargo, on either of their back-and-forth journeys between Sanaa and Tehran. The content and cargo of these planes were never announced to public—not even the type of passengers they were carrying.

One may begin to notice a pattern of the Houthis self-consciously following, step by step, the development of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the most successful transplant of the Iranian Revolution’s model, including using the exact same names at every evolutionary stage of the organization, guided throughout by Hezbollah itself. In this vein, the official Ansar Allah television station, Al-Masirah, was established in Beirut in January 2012, “located next to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV with backup studios at Hezbollah headquarters.” 

Reports of IRGC and Hezbollah interference begin pouring in between 2011 and 2014, when Ansar Allah marched into Yemen’s capital with the aid of Saleh, who technically resigned in 2011 due to protests, and his loyalists in the army. 

In January 2013, the Jihan, an Iranian ship bearing not only sophisticated Iranian arms and explosives, but also Houthis covertly reinfiltrating back into Yemen after training in Iran and elsewhere, was intercepted off Yemen’s coast. The first act of Ansar Allah upon entering Yemen’s capital in September 2014 was to free everyone involved in the incident, “including eight Yemeni crew members, two Hezbollah members and three IRGC personnel”.

Iran has been pragmatically controlling its proxies depending on the political environment in any given country, and moves them towards political participation when it seems more beneficial than pursuing pure military conquest. This was the case in Lebanon and Afghanistan in the 1990s, and eventually in Iraq in the 2000s.