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While the world was fixated on the existential threat of ISIS — a terrorist group that controlled mostly rural territory and had limited, if any, backing by foreign states — the Houthi extremists in Yemen have achieved what their counterparts in Iraq and Syria could only dream of: Domination and destabilization of a country already devastated by poverty, tribal conflict and corruption.

For nearly a decade, the Houthis have controlled large parts of Yemen, including the capital of one the world’s poorest countries. They have erected their own terrorist state architecture in Sana’a and used their base to launch missile attacks not only on Riyadh’s airport but Abu Dhabi’s. 

And they’ve done it all with the full backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which even loaned its Yemeni proteges the Iranian revolutionary slogan: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

But it’s not Sana’a — or even Yemen — that the Houthis and their Iranian paymasters are really interested in. It’s the oil shipping routes in the Red Sea, just off Yemen’s coast, as indicated by the Houthi attack on Saudi oil tankers in July which caused the Saudi kingdom to suspend Red Sea oil shipments, a move that affected the world’s oil markets.

Iran is an ideologically driven state and its end-game is, ultimately, to use its proxy occupation of Yemen to control the global oil supply and weaken its Sunni neighbors.

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