How Saudi Arabia's anti-Houthi strategy crashed and burned

For a decade, Saudi Arabia’s Yemen policy has rested on the assumption that time, money and coercive force, patiently and strategically applied, would eventually produce enough leverage to subdue the Houthis, or at least force them into a settlement on Riyadh’s terms.Over the last two weeks, that assumption has been tested more severely than at any point since 2015, when Saudi Arabia initially launched its military intervention to roll back Houthi control of the Yemeni capital Sanaa. It has not held.Having seized strategically significant swathes of Yemen’s west coast on the Red Sea, the Houthis are now pressing towards Marib, the last major stronghold of forces loyal to the internationally-recognized government of Yemen, and the site of some of the country’s most important oil and gas facilities.If losing the Red Sea coast was a blow to the government, losing Marib would be a decisive defeat. It would represent a loss of its last major population and revenue center in the north, and sever its remaining foothold near the capital. It would also open, for the Houthis, the road toward Shabwa and Hadhramawt — two energy-rich eastern provinces that have long been eyed by the Houthis, whose core demands include a slice of the oil and gas wealth these regions produce.While the headlines tell the story of overwhelming Houthi strength, government forces have also managed some gains. They recaptured positions northwest of Marib and pushed back two major Houthi assaults last week. Advances were also made in western Taiz on Sunday.Whether government forces can more consistently counterattack and hold ground, instead of collapsing in the face of pressure, is among the most important open questions in the war right now.The evidence, however, points to structural problems in the anti-Houthi coalition. A detailed reconstruction of the Mokha battle, penned by Yemen analyst Ibrahim Jalal, highlights a Houthi–fabricated withdrawal order, spread by radio and SMS, using an AI-cloned commander’s voice. Those messages tore through a coalition force that lacked, in his account, a joint operations room actually linking the five formations defending the coast.That detail lines up precisely with what Yemen’s own defense minister, Taher al-Aqili, had already conceded in an interview weeks earlier. As al-Aqili noted, the military “unification” effort since the United Arab Emirates’ withdrawal from Yemen last year has produced a common payroll and biometric ID system, but not the shared training or command structure that would enable the various factions fighting under the government’s umbrella to effectively fight as one force.Riyadh consolidated the org chart by forcing Emirati forces out of Yemen late last year, reacting to a bold offensive by UAE-backed southern separatists who had seized key territory in the south and were preparing to declare independence. However, forcing out the UAE did nothing to consolidate the military itself, nor did it reconcile the clashing interests of the power brokers who comprise Yemen’s executive Presidential Leadership Council.Riyadh’s setbacks in Yemen are followed by additional problems to the north. On Friday, Saudi Arabia’s own foreign ministry confirmed that the drones that knocked out its East-West pipeline — the artery carrying up to four percent of global supply away to the Red Sea — had launched from Iraq.The timing, arriving in the same 72-hour window as the coastal collapse and a fresh wave of Houthi strikes on the Khamis Mushait airbase in the kingdom’s south, suggests coordination. The Associated Press reported in early September, citing Saudi and Iraqi officials, that Houthi emissaries had worked inside an operations room run by Iraqi militias to help plan and execute an earlier swarm attack on Saudi oil infrastructure in July.That level of coordination was close enough that a Houthi fighter was reportedly among the casualties when the U.S. and Saudi Arabia struck back at the militias later that month.As Iran-aligned groups around the region increase pressure on Riyadh, diplomacy between the Arab gulf states and Iran has hit its own wall. The Monday meeting in Oman between Tehran and the Gulf Arab states, which was meant to hash out a framework for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, was called off after Riyadh objected to language implying the strait isn’t an international waterway, leaving Saudi Arabia negotiating on two chokepoints with no resolution on either.Washington, meanwhile, has not been of much help. Roughly 200 U.S. military personnel are already in Saudi Arabia under a newly formed joint command, providing intelligence and targeting support rather than combat power.When President Donald Trump was asked directly on Saturday whether the U.S. would strike the Houthis on the kingdom’s behalf, he effectively said no. “The Houthis called us, and they let us know they don’t want to fight with us,” he said. “They don’t want me to go after them.”It must be frustrating for Riyadh that Washington sees so little threat to its own core interests in Yemen, even though Houthi control of the Red Sea is itself now a driver of the very oil price spike that threatens the Republican party’s political fortunes in the upcoming midterm elections.Riyadh’s other partners have offered even less support. Turkey and Pakistan, bound to Riyadh by the Mecca defense pact signed in August, have stayed out of the fight entirely.A senior Turkish official, briefing the Middle East Eye, argued that the alliance simply hasn’t had time to become operational; its members still need to ratify the treaty domestically then build interoperability and joint-planning mechanisms to support it. All of this could take a “few years,” according to the official.Ominously, even a resolution to the wider U.S.-Iran war, which still appears far off, may not deliver Saudi Arabia much relief.U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the Houthis “agents and proxies of the Iranians.” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, rejected the characterization, insisting that Ansar Allah, the group’s formal name, “takes orders from no one.” The two statements can’t both be fully true, but the evidence increasingly supports the Iranian framing.The Houthis’ antagonism toward Saudi Arabia did not begin with Iranian support. The movement's founders saw Riyadh as an adversary from the moment they organized in the 1990s as a Zaydi Shia revivalist response to Saudi-funded Wahhabi Sunni proselytizing in Yemen’s northern highlands. After the Houthis took Sanaa in 2014 — prompting Riyadh to assemble a military coalition to reverse the takeover in 2015 — the hostility only sharpened. A 2022 truce reduced direct fighting but did little to address the underlying drivers of conflict.Since that truce, the Houthis have only grown more emboldened. And the reality is that the Houthis have not been weakened militarily by any of the punitive campaigns launched against it — not Israel’s decapitation strikes, which killed the group’s prime minister and military chief of staff, nor Operation Rough Rider, the two-month, billion-dollar U.S. bombing campaign last year.If military pressure at that scale couldn’t do it, it stands to reason that negotiation, in the short-term, is the only viable alternative.The Houthis have already made their terms public. Ansar Allah’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, put a figure on it in March: over $57 billion in compensation for oil-sector losses attributed to the Saudi-led war, on top of standing demands to lift what the group calls a blockade of its airports and seaports, and a share of Yemen’s oil and gas revenues — the same revenues the group is now positioning to seize by force.There is no clean way out of this for Riyadh. Even a deal bought at that steep price, and on such difficult terms, would not end the threat. It would simply bankroll the next phase of it by shoring up a movement that would retain, indefinitely, the capacity to threaten Saudi energy infrastructure whenever it chooses.