Ansar Allah’s advance to the Bab el Mandeb is the latest turn in a conflict usually described as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its origins run much deeper: through British colonial rule, the partition of Yemen, Saudi intervention, failed unification, the destruction of a decade of war and the emergence of a movement that now controls much of the country.
The Houthis reach the Gate of Tears
By Friday morning, fighters from Ansar Allah had reached one of the most consequential pieces of real estate in the Middle East.
After capturing Mocha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, Houthi forces advanced through Dhubab and onto Perim, the volcanic island sitting in the narrow Bab el Mandeb Strait. Saudi aircraft responded with strikes. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had twice urged President Donald Trump to order American attacks on the Houthis, according to a Reuters report citing Axios, but Washington declined, reluctant to open another direct front while its war with Iran was already disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The immediate military significance is obvious. Bab el Mandeb, the “Gate of Tears”, joins the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and, beyond it, the Suez Canal. An estimated 7 per cent of global oil production normally passes through the strait. On Thursday, only seven vessels were recorded passing through Hormuz, compared with a prewar daily average of about 125. The prospect that instability could simultaneously grip the two maritime entrances to the Arabian peninsula has therefore become a problem not only for Yemen or Saudi Arabia but for the global economy.
Ansar Allah says international navigation remains safe and that its present restrictions are directed against Saudi shipping. Its adversaries see an Iranian aligned movement acquiring the capacity to hold another global trade artery at risk. Iran has unquestionably helped build the Houthis’ missile, drone and maritime capabilities, and Iranian military advisers were reported to have assisted the latest offensive. But to begin the history of Ansar Allah with Iran is to begin the story far too late.
The road to Perim begins not in Tehran but in the long struggle over Yemen itself: over who could govern it, where its borders should lie, which outside power would dominate it and, repeatedly, who would control the waters beside it.
Britain understood the value of those waters almost two centuries ago.
Britain comes to Aden
In January 1839, British and East India Company forces seized Aden. It was an act of imperial expansion, not an invitation from the population of southern Arabia. Britain wanted a harbour on the route to India at precisely the moment when steam navigation was changing the mechanics of empire. Aden offered a place from which ships could be supplied and British commerce and communications protected. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, its value increased dramatically.
British troops search civilians in colonial Aden in 1967, during the final months of 128 years of British rule, as an anti colonial insurgency gathered force and London struggled to retain control of its strategic outpost at the entrance to the Red Sea.
The colonial relationship was therefore unequal at its foundation. A stronger foreign power took control of territory belonging to others because the territory served its strategic purposes.
That does not mean Aden was economically frozen under British rule. The port expanded, commerce grew and infrastructure was built. Colonialism was rarely as simple as removing wealth from a hole in the ground and shipping it to Europe. Its deeper characteristic was the appropriation of sovereignty. Britain decided how Aden would be governed because Aden had become an asset of the British imperial system. The harbour, administration and military installations were ultimately organised around an empire whose centre lay thousands of miles away.
Nor did Britain stop at the port. Around Aden it constructed a web of protectorates and relationships with sultans and tribal rulers, often exercising indirect rather than direct rule. The historian John M. Willis has shown how imperial officials used treaties, maps, ethnographic classifications and administrative boundaries to make the complicated political landscape around Aden legible and governable, drawing on practices developed in British India.
Ottoman Yemen and an imperial frontier
Northern Yemen was experiencing a different form of imperial rule. The Ottoman Empire re established itself over much of the north during the nineteenth century, although its authority was repeatedly contested by Zaydi leaders and tribes in the highlands.
Ottoman rule was not identical to British overseas colonialism: it belonged to a territorial, multiethnic empire incorporating Arab provinces into an imperial state. But Istanbul nevertheless sought taxation, administration and political obedience from a region whose inhabitants frequently resisted its authority.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, British and Ottoman officials turned this rivalry into geography. The Anglo Ottoman Boundary Commission of 1902 to 1905 surveyed and demarcated a frontier between the Aden Protectorate and Ottoman Yemen. Imperial cartographers were helping to turn fluid landscapes of tribes, local rulers and overlapping allegiances into bounded political territory.
Long before Yemenis established separate northern and southern republics, outsiders had therefore helped draw the line between them.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the trajectories diverged further. The Zaydi Imam Yahya established an independent kingdom in the north. Britain remained in Aden and the southern protectorates.
Saudi Arabia enters the Yemeni struggle
Another expanding power was meanwhile taking shape to the north. The Saudi state and the Yemeni imamate contested territories including Najran, Jizan and Asir. War in 1934 ended in a Saudi victory and the Treaty of Taif, which formalised Saudi control over most of the disputed territory. In Yemen, the settlement was widely regarded as one imposed by military defeat. The border question would remain contentious for decades.
This history matters because Saudi involvement in Yemen long predates either Iran’s Islamic revolution or the emergence of the Houthis.
When republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen in 1962, Saudi Arabia intervened again, this time on the side of the Zaydi royalists. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser sent tens of thousands of troops to support the republican regime. Riyadh financed and armed forces trying to restore the imam.
The alignment is worth remembering. Saudi Arabia, the great Sunni monarchy, supported a Zaydi Shia monarchy against Arab republicans. Sectarian labels explain less about Middle Eastern politics than is often supposed. For Riyadh, Nasser’s revolutionary nationalism on its southern frontier was the greater threat.
When the civil war eventually subsided, Saudi influence did not disappear. Riyadh developed relationships with Yemeni tribal leaders and political figures, distributing money through networks that gave the kingdom considerable leverage inside its neighbour. Saudi support moved from royalist tribes during the civil war to influential republican sheikhs afterwards, including the powerful Al Ahmar family of the Hashid confederation.
The British leave and the Cold War arrives
South of the old imperial boundary, another revolution was unfolding. Britain was fighting an increasingly violent anti colonial insurgency in and around Aden. Its attempt to preserve influence through a Federation of South Arabia built around allied local rulers failed.
British forces withdrew in 1967 and the National Liberation Front took power. The new state abolished the old protectorate structures, nationalised much of the economy and eventually aligned itself closely with the Soviet Union.
The imperial divide had become a Cold War divide.
North Yemen was a conservative republican state entangled with Saudi Arabia. South Yemen became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the Arab world’s only avowedly Marxist state. They fought, negotiated and talked intermittently about unity, while developing separate armies and political systems.
The south was hardly stable itself. Internal factional conflict culminated in extraordinarily bloody fighting in Aden in 1986, weakening the socialist state just as its Soviet patron was entering its final years.
Unification without unity
Unification in 1990 was therefore less the culmination of an inevitable national project than a political gamble made possible by changing circumstances.
The Soviet system was collapsing. South Yemen was losing its principal external patron. Oil discoveries offered economic incentives for cooperation. Ali Abdullah Saleh in the north and Ali Salem al Beidh in the south agreed to combine their states.
The map changed faster than the political realities beneath it.
The two military establishments were not properly integrated. Rival political organisations distrusted each other. Assassinations and power struggles multiplied. By 1994 the unified republic was at war with itself. Southern leaders attempted to secede; Saleh’s forces, assisted by Islamists and southern factions hostile to the old socialist leadership, defeated them. After victory, Saleh emerged with authority over the entire country.
The state he built was held together less by strong institutions than by patronage, bargaining and the management of competing centres of power. Saleh famously compared governing Yemen to dancing on the heads of snakes. Tribal sheikhs, military commanders, Islamists, businessmen and regional patrons were incorporated, rewarded or played against one another.
Saudi Arabia remained deeply involved in this political landscape.
Far to the north, however, the settlement was generating a different kind of resistance.
The movement that became Ansar Allah
Saada was the historical heartland of Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam distinct from the Twelver Shiism dominant in Iran. Zaydi imams had ruled much of northern Yemen for centuries. After the republican revolution, that political and religious world steadily lost influence.
At the same time, Salafi teaching expanded in the north, including through institutions and preachers associated with Saudi religious networks.
The Believing Youth emerged from this environment as a movement to revive Zaydi teaching and identity. Hussein Badreddin al Houthi became one of its central figures. He increasingly attacked Saleh’s corruption, his dependence on Saudi Arabia and his alignment with the United States, particularly after the September 11 attacks and the American invasion of Iraq.
This is the point at which the conventional description of the Houthis as an “Iranian proxy” becomes historically inadequate.
Iran did not create the Zaydi tradition. It did not create Saada’s marginalisation. It did not create the Believing Youth or Hussein al Houthi’s opposition to Saleh. The movement emerged from Yemeni political, religious and social conflicts.
Saleh tried to crush it.
Hussein al Houthi was killed by government forces in 2004. Instead of disappearing, his followers fought the Yemeni state through six rounds of war over the following six years. The fighting hardened the movement, enlarged its military experience and turned the Houthi name into the identity of a rebellion now led by Hussein’s younger brother, Abdul Malik.
The revolution that failed to remake the state
Then came 2011.
The Arab uprisings brought hundreds of thousands of Yemenis onto the streets against Saleh. The Houthis joined the protest movement. Under a Gulf brokered transition, Saleh relinquished the presidency to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, but much of the old system survived.
A National Dialogue attempted to design a new political order. Houthis, southerners, political parties, women and civil society participated. Yet the proposed six region federal arrangement generated new grievances. Ansar Allah objected that the plan would confine its northern heartland to a poor inland region without adequate access to the coast or major resources. Southern groups had their own objections.
Then Yemeni politics produced one of its most extraordinary reversals.
Saleh, who had spent years trying to destroy the Houthis, entered into a tactical alliance with them. Both had reasons to weaken Hadi and the Islamist Islah party. Saleh retained networks within the military and state; the Houthis possessed a battle hardened armed movement.
Together they transformed the balance of power.
In September 2014, Houthi forces entered Sana’a.
To their supporters, this was a revolution against a corrupt political order sustained from abroad. To their opponents, it was an armed seizure of the state.
Both descriptions contain elements of reality.
Saudi Arabia goes to war
Hadi fled south. Houthi and allied forces advanced towards Aden. In March 2015 he requested outside military assistance.
Saudi Arabia assembled a coalition and launched an air campaign intended to restore the internationally recognised government.
Riyadh called it a legitimate intervention.
Ansar Allah and Iran called it an invasion.
What followed was a war whose consequences vastly exceeded its original objectives.
Saudi Arabia possessed overwhelming air power but could not eliminate the Houthis. Bombing, fighting, restrictions on imports, economic fragmentation, infrastructure destruction, currency collapse and the disintegration of public services helped produce one of the gravest humanitarian disasters of the twenty first century.
The suffering cannot adequately be conveyed by saying simply that Yemen experienced “food insecurity”. Yemen entered a prolonged hunger emergency in which millions of families could no longer reliably obtain enough to eat, children arrived at clinics dangerously wasted, and disease struck populations already weakened by malnutrition. The country depended heavily on imported food before the war. When ports, transport, incomes and the economy were disrupted together, the price of survival itself moved beyond the reach of millions.
There is no single agreed death toll, in part because many Yemenis were not killed by bombs or bullets. They died because war destroyed the conditions necessary to remain alive. A United Nations Development Programme model estimated that by the end of 2021 the conflict had caused about 377,000 deaths. Of these, roughly 154,000 were attributed to direct combat and violence, while about 223,000, nearly 60 per cent, resulted indirectly from consequences such as hunger, malnutrition and disease. The same modelling estimated that 259,000 of those conflict attributable deaths were children under five.
The distinction is important. A child who died from severe malnutrition after a family lost its income, food prices soared and the health service ceased to function does not appear in a conventional battlefield casualty count. Yet that death belonged to the war as surely as one caused by an air strike.
At the height of the crisis, the scale of child hunger was extraordinary. In 2021, UN agencies projected that 2.3 million children under five would suffer acute malnutrition, including about 400,000 with severe acute malnutrition, the form capable of killing a child without urgent treatment. The following year, 17.4 million Yemenis required food assistance and UN agencies warned that the number unable to meet minimum food needs could rise to 19 million.
Strictly speaking, Yemen was not uniformly classified as being in famine. That technical distinction sometimes obscured what was happening on the ground. Humanitarian assistance repeatedly kept parts of the country from crossing the formal thresholds used to declare famine. The absence of a nationwide famine declaration was therefore not evidence that the hunger catastrophe had been exaggerated; in considerable part it reflected the aid operations that prevented an even greater death toll.
More than a decade after the war began, the emergency has still not disappeared. In 2026, the World Food Programme estimates that 17.1 million Yemenis remain food insecure and 19.5 million need humanitarian assistance. Hundreds of thousands of children continue to require treatment for severe acute malnutrition. What began as a military intervention became a generational disaster whose effects continued long after the intensity of the bombing declined.
The United States and Britain were deeply implicated in the war without formally becoming combatants in the same sense as Saudi Arabia. Washington sold weapons and provided military support, including aerial refuelling for coalition aircraft until 2018. Britain supplied and supported aircraft, missiles and bombs used by Saudi forces.
Western governments described these relationships in terms of alliances and regional security; Yemenis living beneath the bombing experienced them differently.
Iran finds an ally
Iran, meanwhile, increasingly supplied the Houthis with the assistance that their adversaries now emphasise. UN investigators have concluded that many of Ansar Allah’s sophisticated missiles, drones and maritime weapons could not have been developed without outside support.
The chronology matters.
Iran found a movement that already existed.
It did not invent one.
But the movement Iran found was transformed by the relationship. An insurgency born in Saada gradually acquired ballistic missiles, long range drones, anti ship weapons and the capacity to project force hundreds of miles beyond Yemen.
Ansar Allah was also changing internally. It became not merely a resistance movement but an authoritarian government. It has detained opponents and journalists, obstructed humanitarian organisations and been accused by UN investigators of indiscriminate attacks and other abuses.
Historical grievance does not absolve a movement of responsibility for what it does once it holds power.
The alliance with Saleh eventually collapsed as violently as it had begun. In 2017, after Saleh tried to change sides, Houthi forces killed him.
By then, however, Ansar Allah no longer needed him.
The movement controlled Sana’a and most of Yemen’s populous northern highlands. Saudi Arabia had failed to restore the old order. A UN mediated truce in 2022 sharply reduced cross border fighting, but it did not settle the political conflict.
Gaza turns Yemen into a regional front
Then Gaza changed Yemen’s war again.
After Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began in 2023, Ansar Allah declared that it would attack shipping connected to Israel in solidarity with Palestinians. The targets subsequently extended much more widely.
A UN panel found that Houthi attacks did not remain confined to vessels demonstrably linked to Israel, while commercial shipping companies diverted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope and away from the Red Sea. The United States and Britain responded by striking Houthi positions in Yemen.
For Ansar Allah, Gaza offered something more than another battlefield. It placed a Yemeni movement at the centre of the Arab world’s most politically resonant cause and allowed it to present itself not as a faction in a forgotten civil war but as part of a broader resistance to Israel and Western power.
For Iran, the Houthis became one of the most strategically useful components of the regional network Tehran had cultivated over decades.
And yet the relationship remained more complicated than the word “proxy” suggests. Iranian support expanded Houthi military power dramatically. It did not erase the movement’s own leadership, interests, Yemeni constituency or historical roots.
The war returns to Bab el Mandeb
That distinction has become particularly important now.
The offensive that brought Ansar Allah to Mocha, Dhubab and Perim this week has unfolded while Iran and the United States are already engaged in a wider conflict and shipping through Hormuz has collapsed. Iranian assistance gives the advance an unmistakable regional dimension.
But the fighters who arrived at Bab el Mandeb also carry with them almost two centuries of Yemeni history.
In 1839, Britain seized Aden because an imperial power understood that controlling the coastline beside the Red Sea could help secure commerce linking Europe and Asia.
In 2026, Saudi aircraft are again bombing that coastline, American officials are debating whether to intervene, Iran is assisting the most powerful armed movement in Yemen and financial markets are calculating the consequences should another maritime artery become unsafe.
The actors have changed.
The geography has not.
That is why Yemen cannot adequately be understood as a sideshow to a confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its modern history is one of imperial conquest, contested borders, foreign intervention, failed state building, local resistance and the repeated attempts of more powerful states to determine its political future.
Ansar Allah has turned that history into part of its political legitimacy. It depicts the struggle against Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel as the latest chapter in a much older fight for Yemeni sovereignty.
That account is selective. It understates Iranian assistance and obscures the movement’s own increasingly coercive exercise of power.
But it resonates because the historical experience behind it is real.
British forces did seize Aden. Imperial officials did help construct the political division of Yemen. Saudi Arabia repeatedly intervened in Yemeni affairs. Western governments did arm and support the coalition that bombed the country after 2015. Iran subsequently did help transform the Houthis into a regional military force.
None of those facts requires turning Ansar Allah into either a heroic liberation movement or a puppet of Tehran.
It is something more complicated: a profoundly Yemeni movement born from the failures of the Yemeni state, shaped by a Zaydi political tradition, hardened by wars waged against it, empowered by Iran, and increasingly authoritarian as it accumulated power.
Now that movement has reached the Gate of Tears.
Perim is a small island at the mouth of the Red Sea. Yet from its shores it is possible to see much of the history that produced the present crisis: empire, commerce, borders, intervention and resistance compressed into one narrow stretch of water.
Britain understood its importance in the nineteenth century.
The Houthis understand it today.