The Houthi Jihad Council: Command and Control in 'the Other Hezbollah'.

• Author: Knights, Michael

In September 2018, one of the authors of this article published an analysis of the military evolution of the Houthi movement (a) in CTC Sentinel, noting the group's very rapid five-year development from an insurgent group fielding roadside bombs to a state-level actor using medium-range ballistic missiles. (1) Since then, the Houthis have further consolidated their hold over the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, and the Red Sea coast port city of Hodeida, and nearly won the civil war with a sustained (but ultimately indecisive) military offensive against Yemen's oil and gas hub at Ma'rib. (2) On January 19, 2021, the outgoing Trump administration designated the Houthi organizational institution Ansar Allah as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), a step that the Biden administration almost immediately revoked on February 16, 2021. (3) Some Houthi leaders remained covered by older sanctions (4) (b) (and additional Houthi military leaders continue to be added to U.S. sanctions lists) for posing a "threat to the peace, security, or stability of Yemen." (5)

A fragile U.N.-brokered ceasefire between the Houthis and their military opponents in Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) (6) held from April to October 2022 but has (at the time of writing) lapsed, (7) (c) and the path to long-term conflict resolution remains unclear. As a rebel force now in control of much of the Yemeni state, the Houthis will likely be required to give up some of their gains in return for an enduring peace, and such a peace may not be welcomed by the Houthis' strongest backers in the war--namely Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. (d) The Houthis continue to pose a military and counterterrorism threat to the United States and its partners in the region, (e) as well as a menace to global commerce in the Red Sea. (f) All these considerations necessitate a fuller understanding of the Houthi political-military leadership, its core motivations, and the nature and extent of Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah influence within the movement.

In this new article, an enlarged and strengthened team with extensive on-the-ground access in Houthi-held areas (g) will look in-depth at the structure and composition of Houthi military leadership. An excellent anthropological and socio-political literature already exists on the Houthis thanks to ground-breaking studies by RAND (8) and the writings of academics such as Marieke Brandt. (9) This article builds on this literature by updating the RAND study and focusing more attention on military aspects and on the proven roles of Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah in Houthi military affairs. In the opening section, the article reviews the genealogical, social, political-religious, and environmental (i.e., wartime) drivers for the emergence of the current generation of Houthi military and security leaders. It next examines command politics under the Houthis' current leader Abdalmalik al-Huthi. It then looks in-depth at the Jihad Council established by the Houthis to centralize military and security decision-making using a mechanism adapted from Lebanese Hezbollah. Then the article looks at the role within the Houthi Jihad Council of the IRGC Jihad Assistant and his Lebanese Hezbollah Deputy. The next section explores the Houthi administrative takeover of Yemen's military institutions and the gradual mobilization and indoctrination of a new generation of active service soldiers and reserves. In the penultimate part, the article looks at how the Houthis employ armed forces and which commanders have operational control of key geographic commands and praetorian or specialized forces. The article concludes with analytic findings concerning which segments of the Houthi war machine might support conflict termination and which elements are most likely to continue to threaten the peace, security, or stability of Yemen.

Generational Change in the Houthi Leadership

The composition of the Houthi movement has changed throughout its lifespan, demonstrating (in the view of the authors) both a remarkable openness to an ever-broadening general membership but also, under the surface, an obdurate refusal to share real power beyond a small set of male antecedents related to religious scholar Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a sadah (10) (descendant of the Prophet) and influential Zaydi (h) preacher until his death (by natural causes) in 2010. (11) Of critical importance, Badr al-Din and his sons were members of the minority Jarudi sect of Zaydism, (i) the denomination of Zaydism closest to Shi'a Islam in political theology. (j)

Badr al-Din was thus the root of today's Houthi movement, which is still dominated by his sons and other male relatives. (12) The four marriages of Badr al-Din (13) created the foundation of the Houthi movement in the Sa'ada province of northern Yemen. Badr al-Din had 13 sons who reached maturity. (14) Of these 13, most married at least once. This created a baseline force consisting of circles of tribal protection for Badr al-Din and his sons. As noted by Marieke Brandt, the preeminent anthropologist of the Houthi area, the Khawlan tribal confederation of northern Yemen was "the first incubator of the Houthi movement." (15)

Husayn Badr al-Din al-Huthi built upon this base to form the first generation of the Houthi paramilitary movement in the 1980s and 1990s. (16) He had his father's gift for oratory and religious studies, and he was highly political. (k) Born in either 1956 or 1959, Husayn was a young and politically receptive twenty-something when the Islamic Revolution unfolded in Iran. Far from reluctant or recent partners of Iran, Badr al-Din and Husayn's family enthusiastically embraced Khomeinism and the example of the Islamic Revolution. (l) As Morteza Mohatwari, a senior Zaydi cleric, said in 2010, for Zaydis of Husayn's generation the Iranian regime's version of Twelver Shiism is the true Zaydism because it mobilizes the masses to confront foreign powers and unjust rulers. (m) His father Badr al-Din visited Iran (and Beirut) for intermittent stays between 1979 and Badr al-Din's death in 2010, (17) usually taking Husayn and later some of his other sons with him, notably his fifth son, Mohammed (born around 1965), (18) and his ninth son, Abdalmalik (born around 1979), (n) both of whom were avid religious students produced by Badr al-Din's unions with sadah families. (o)

By the early 1990s, Husayn had two main political influences: Iran's first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Usama bin Ladin, both of whose speeches he followed with particular fascination due to their willingness to stand up to Israel and to American "arrogance." (p) In 1994, Badr al-Din and Husayn began sending 40 religious students a year to Qom (q)--a flow that would eventually produce around 800 Qom-trained students, (r) some of whom are reported to have been groomed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with paramilitary training. (19) In 1999-2000, Husayn Badr al-Din spent a year undertaking religious studies in Khartoum (20) at a time when Sudan was the most active IRGC and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) outstation on the Red Sea. (21) Husayn then went from Sudan to Iran, and when he returned from this retreat, he introduced the now infamous slogan that supercharged the Houthi movement, "the scream" (al-shi'ar): "Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse upon the Jews,

Victory to Islam." (22)

Scholars disagree on the fundamental drivers of Husayn's political ambitions: One theory is that Badr al-Din and Husayn were primarily pursuing a so-called hadawi (23) agenda, a doctrine that held sadah (collectively the Ahl al-Bayt, the descendants of the Prophet) to be superior to other Yemenis and the only caste fit for leadership. (24) In the hadawi theory, Badr al-Din and Husayn sought a return of some form of imamate or other system of governance under sadah leadership (which had been the long preeminent form of government in parts of northern Yemen from around 897 AD until 1962 AD). (25) Others see a combination of social mobility and dynastic agendas, (26) with Badr al-Din and Husayn outmaneuvering longer-established and richer Zaydi sadah families through the dynamic use of a Lebanese Hezbollah-type Zaydi-Shi'a revivalist movement (called "Believing/Faithful Youth" (Muntada al-Shahabal-Mu'min)) that employed summer camps, social programs, and a political party. (27) Still others assess that Badr al-Din and Husayn were surreptitiously introducing Jarudi Zaydism and related Iranian Twelver aspects to the broader Zaydi practice of Islam (28) (s)--what Oved Lobel characterized as "a neo-Twelver core carved out of the Zaydi revival." (29) All, some, or none of these motives for Badr al-Din and Husayn's activism may have been operative at the same time, but what the authors of this study assess can be said with a higher degree of certainty is that Husayn and his father were intent on breaking the mold of northern Yemeni political Islam and that they looked to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and to Lebanese Hezbollah for inspiration, ideas, and support. (t)

All of the above factors shaped the composition of the Houthi leadership that emerged under Husayn and entered the first of the six wars that raged between the Yemeni government and the Houthi movement in 2004-2010. (30) Husayn now commanded a sizable cohort of Khawlan bir Amir confederation tribesmen, including hundreds of religious students sent to Qom seminaries and well over 10,000 young men sent through Believing Youth summer camps and social or educational programs under his stewardship inside Yemen. (31) (u) This initial Houthi cadre demonstrated some of the enduring characteristics of Houthi command and control.

First, in the authors' assessment, the movement preferred the membership of fighters who were with Husayn since the start of the six wars in 2004. In the authors' view, this cadre had advantages over all later joiners due to the longevity of their...