The world is lurching towards a new era of mass warfare in which ever more advanced technology is deployed in the service of increasingly primitive ideologies. Nowhere is this clearer than with the Houthis of Yemen.
In recent days, the terror group has launched ballistic missiles at Israel, claiming to have targeted military sites, though Israel says only a limited number were fired and all were intercepted.
Officially known as Ansar Allah (Defenders of God), the Houthis are a clan from the remote mountain province of Saada in Yemen’s north west, rooted in the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam.
The group emerged in the 1990s under Hussein al-Houthi, a man profoundly influenced by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and his tenets remain its ideological bedrock. Killed by the Yemeni government in 2004, he was succeeded by his equally fanatical brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, who leads the movement to this day.
From a few thousand fighters in the early 2000s, the UN now estimates their forces to be in the hundreds of thousands.
