The Saudis also have the White Army, heavily armed soldiers from the Saudi tribes most loyal to the House of Saud. Throughout the region, gunmen are recruited and retained based on their loyalty to the rulers. Of particular interest is the Saudi Special Forces brigade. This unit makes up only a small percentage of Saudi military manpower. American money and training turned these commandos into effective killers. Until recently, they have been going after Islamic terrorists. The Houthis fit the description and are going to be met, on their way into Saudi Arabia, by some very violent and well-trained defenders of the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia was created between 1919 and 1934. This period saw frequent wars among seven independent Arab warlords. The British and Italians had colonial interests in the region but agreed to leave the Islamic holy sites under Islamic control. The kingdoms of Yemen and Najd seemed most expansionist, with Sultan Abdul Aziz al Saud the most successful at conquering neighboring Arab states. Great Britain intervened to prevent the conquest of Kuwait in 1920 because it sought indirect control of the eastern Arabian shore on the Persian Gulf and access to the Strait of Hormuz. It also concerned intra-Arab conflicts that led to the creation of Saudi Arabia, its domination of the Arabian Peninsula's interior, and the solidification of the Kingdom of Yemen in the southwest.

Yemen remains a problem area for the 11th consecutive year. The civil war, lack of food and medical care for the civilian population, and seizure of foreign aid personnel by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen continued. This hindered the efforts of the government, NGOs, and international organizations to address these problems. At the start of 2025, the Houthi militia in Yemen halted their attacks on American commercial ships headed for the Suez Canal. Those attacks resumed after the June 13–14, 2025 American and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Yemen sits at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, with the Persian Gulf on its northeast coast, the Red Sea on its west coast, and the Indian Ocean on its southeast coast. Ships that don’t use the Suez Canal must take a much longer route around the southern coast of Africa. A lot more merchant vessels are making that journey due to the very high cost of war risk insurance for going through the Red Sea, which is now an official war zone. On the plus side, the need for so many more ships to make this long journey, instead of taking the shorter route through the Suez Canal, required a 10% increase in the tanker and container ship fleet. Fortunately, an eleven percent surplus of these long ships existed, and now nearly all of them are at work.

The Houthis say they are at war with Israel and still fire at ships at random, though they contend they only fire on ships serving Israel. So far, over 200 ships have been attacked, and about 20 percent have been damaged.

The U.S. Navy sent a carrier task force to launch airstrikes on Houthi targets with predictable minor effects. That led to more frequent and aggressive attacks, which briefly reduced Houthi activity. These attacks used over 200 missiles and as many shells from 127 mm or five-inch guns on destroyers. Several of those 127 mm shells shot down Houthi drones.

In 2024, one of the Houthi drones hit a building in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, killing one civilian and wounding several others. The next day, Israel sent F-15 and F-35 fighter-bombers to destroy several economic targets in the Yemeni Red Sea port of Hudaydah. This is where weapons arrive from Iran for the Houthis to use against Red Sea shipping. The airstrikes destroyed fuel storage sites as well as port facilities, including the difficult-to-replace ship-unloading cranes. If the Israelis leave the port alone, repairs could take up to a year. The Israelis and other nations are not leaving the port of Hudaydah alone if the Houthis are using it.

Yemen’s Shia rebels, led by the Houthi tribe, have used their large stockpile of Iranian missiles to try to block access to the Suez Canal. This capability developed over the last decade as the rebels launched attacks on more distant targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer-range ballistic missiles to fire from northern Yemen across Saudi territory to hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also acquired the reconnaissance capability to accurately fire missiles at ships passing through the narrow, 26-kilometer-wide Bab el-Mandeb strait off southwestern Yemen and force ships to take the longer, more expensive, and time-consuming fourteen-day, 6,000-kilometer route around the southern tip of Africa.

These attacks have long threatened ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the Red Sea's northern end. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source of income for Egypt, bringing in about $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies, and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemeni rebels for more than a decade to make such an interdiction possible.

Western nations reacted slowly to this interdiction effort but, by the end of 2024, were launching regular airstrikes on Houthi targets, coordinating their efforts with the Israelis and U.S. carrier task forces operating in the region. In October 2024, American B-2 bombers dropped penetrating bombs on Houthi underground facilities, destroying missile stockpiles and headquarters for the rebels. This reduced the number of missiles available. This was seen in the lower frequency of attacks. A naval blockade of Yemen was tightened, with more frequent inspections of fishing boats and coastal freighters.

Western warships close to the Yemeni shore continue using their defensive weapons to defeat attacks launched from the Yemeni coast. The United States currently has several destroyers based off Yemen's coast.

The Arabian Peninsula is home to several wealthy Arab kingdoms that prosper on vast reserves of petroleum beneath the desert sands. The only area with no oil is Yemen's fertile south. Until the Persian Gulf oil industry emerged over a century ago, Yemen was the most prosperous part of Arabia because monsoon rains kept it green on its way to East Africa. The current head of the Houthi movement is 47-year-old Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. Several of his predecessors were killed by American, Arabian, or European attacks. The loss of so many Houthi leaders has not disrupted the violent activities of the Houthis and, with the aid of Iranian-supplied missiles and drones against shipping in the Red Sea and an occasional missile attack on Israel, shows no sign of slowing. The Israeli missile defense system blocks the Houthi attacks, but the Houthis are satisfied that they can make such attacks. These attacks justify the hundreds of millions of dollars in missiles and other military aid Iran has sent to the Houthis.

Western efforts to disrupt Houthi violence via assassination of Houthi leaders have failed. The Houthi clan is large, and there are always replacements. At best, these assassinations disrupt Houthi operations. Opponents are dealing with a death cult that disregards the loss of Yemeni civilians and leaders so they can concentrate on attacking Israel and its allies. Few of these attacks do any damage and usually elicit retaliatory attacks that kill a lot of Houthis, Yemenis, and any Iranians in the way. Any Yemenis or Iranians who protest this treatment are attacked and often killed by Houthi or Iranian forces. The Israeli/Western response is to kill as many Houthi supporters and Iranian allies as possible. This approach largely destroyed the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in 2024. Hezbollah still exists but was rendered ineffective for months and is still trying to rebuild. Disrupting Houthi finances and logistical operations is essential. Even terrorists must be paid, and there is so much opportunity for graft in Yemen that the Houthis can easily keep their fighters motivated.

This war in Yemen drags on into 2025. Before the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Iran-backed militias in Lebanon, Iran was under widespread internal pressure from Iranians protesting the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Despite that, Iran smuggled in more weapons. These were not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war but for use against targets designated by Iran. At the same time, Iran faced domestic uprisings. The Iranian religious dictatorship held onto power and supported more violence against real or perceived enemies of Iran.

In early 2015, Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Houthi Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing. Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war happened because, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemens finally united in 1990, but another civil war in 1994 was needed to finalize unification. That fix didn't really take, and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since.

This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city-states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding, farming, or a little of both, plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This concept of nationhood is still looked on with some suspicion. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity, like a kingdom, an emirate, or a modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.

For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Houthis in the north. The Houthis have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam, a religious leader who was a Houthi. The central government ended this arrangement in 1962, after it had survived more than a thousand years. Yemen also became the new headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula/AQAP when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists after 2007. Now there is the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/ISIL and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which was very upset by Iranian/Houthi missile attacks. By late 2017, the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni majority is not. By late 2025, the Houthi militia was still using missiles from Iran and improvised fire boats to attack shipping in the Red Sea. Some of the missiles are fired at Israel, where most are intercepted. A few missiles get through and do some damage. When that happens, the Israelis retaliate with devastating airstrikes on Yemeni ports and infrastructure. Most of the Yemenis want the Houthis to go away. That will not happen if the Houthis' attacks on Israel continue. This is very popular in Arab countries.

James F Dunnigan