Decoding the Houthi Doctrine: How Foundational Ideology Fuels Its Strategy of Confrontation

International observers have frequently framed the Houthis’ recent attacks on Saudi airports and other civilian targets through the lenses of military strategy, regional rivalry, and the militia’s alliance with Tehran. Beneath the missile launches and drone deployments, however, lies an ideology that fractures the world into allies and enemies, claims exclusive religious legitimacy, and frames confrontation as a sacred duty.

Emerging from a network of religious study groups in northern Yemen, the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, have evolved from a local militia into a regional power capable of threatening global energy supplies and disrupting one of the world’s most critical shipping routes.

Their origins trace back to the teachings of Hussein Al-Houthi, who sought to restructure Yemen’s religious and political order around the authority of the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants. Combining a radical interpretation of Zaydi Shiite Islam with inspiration from Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Al-Houthi built a movement that merged religious instruction, political mobilization, and preparation for armed conflict.

His writings reflect a worldview where religious disagreement could justify exclusion and hostility, while resistance to the US and Israel became a defining obligation. Although these texts do not provide direct religious justification for every attack on civilians, they clarify the ideological framework the movement uses to define its enemies and legitimize violence.

The group emerged in 1992 amid Iran’s push to export its revolution and wider regional upheaval, including the Iran-Iraq War. Its goal was to establish an imamate—a system of governance reserved for a specific lineage descending from the prophet.

Hussein’s father, Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi, died in November 2010 and was known for doctrinal rigidity and sectarian intolerance. He refused to invoke the customary blessing, “May God be pleased with them,” for the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Omar. Hussein adopted the same stance, withholding the blessing from Aisha, the prophet’s wife and daughter of Abu Bakr.

The elder Al-Houthi criticized the Sahih and Sunan hadith collections, accusing scholars Al-Bukhari and Muslim of falsely attributing statements to the prophet to curry favor with rulers. Hussein inherited these positions.

In 1996, Badr Al-Din and his sons resigned from the Al-Haqq Party following a dispute with religious authority Majd Al-Din Al-Muayyadi, concentrating instead on the Believing Youth organization, which expanded across Saada, Dhamar, Amran, and other regions. Insisting on the right of the prophet’s family to rule, the organization moved toward a revolutionary doctrine of the imamate, distancing itself from moderate Zaydism, the branch of Shiite Islam historically rooted in Yemen.

After visiting Iran and studying under clerics in Qom, the movement increasingly absorbed the influence of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Hezbollah, shifting focus from religious outreach to political mobilization and armed confrontation.

Fighting against the Yemeni government began in 2004, with six rounds of conflict ensuing between 2004 and 2010. Hostilities spread from Saada to several governorates and reached the Saudi border. Some estimates placed the number of Houthi fighters involved in the final round at approximately 10,000.

The movement participated in protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011 but rejected the Gulf initiative that transferred power to his deputy, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. In September 2014, the Houthis captured Sanaa and expanded southward, eventually prompting an international coalition to intervene in March 2015.

The conflict escalated into a regional confrontation. Houthi missiles and drones struck Saudi border areas and airports, including Abha, as well as oil facilities. A 2019 attack on major Saudi oil-processing sites demonstrated the reach of the movement’s arsenal.

Following a UN-brokered truce that reduced fighting in 2022, the Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in and around the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in November 2023, citing support for Palestinians during the Gaza war. These attacks compelled shipping companies to divert vessels around Africa and triggered US and British strikes against Houthi targets.

By October 2026, renewed assaults on Saudi targets, a declared maritime embargo, and fighting along Yemen’s Red Sea coast had again endangered civilians and international shipping. The core question remains how the movement’s founding ideology explains its approach to confrontation and its designation of those against whom violence is directed.

On Jan. 17, 2002, Hussein Al-Houthi introduced the Iranian revolutionary slogan “Death to America, death to Israel” at the Imam Al-Hadi School in Marran, Saada, asking attendees to repeat it. He viewed Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as an inspirational figure who grasped the concepts of loyalty and enmity. He embraced Khomeini’s call for the “disavowal of America, disavowal of the polytheists, disavowal of Israel,” supported International Quds Day, and described Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as “the man who shook America.”

However, Al-Houthi’s doctrine went beyond opposition to foreign powers. He considered anyone who rejected the belief that Ali ibn Abi Talib had been explicitly designated as the prophet’s successor during the prophet’s lifetime an unbeliever. In the first lesson of his commentary on Surah Al-Maidah, he attributed the killings of descendants of Abu Talib to the wrongdoing of Omar and Abu Bakr, describing Abu Bakr’s leadership as an evil whose repercussions Muslims continue to suffer.

His treatise “Unity in Faith” characterized the teachings of Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab as part of a Jewish conspiracy against Islam, grouping them alongside the Qadiani and Baha’i movements. His conception of Muslim unity permitted only one doctrinal path. Those who disagreed were expected to abandon their beliefs and adopt his teachings.

Another treatise, “Loyalty and Enmity,” extended hostility to anyone departing from the path of the prophet’s family, including some of the prophet’s wives and anyone who had fought Ali or any of the imams. The significance of these teachings lies in their conception of religious disagreement. Rather than viewing competing interpretations as legitimate differences within Islam, Al-Houthi categorized some opponents as unbelievers and framed loyalty to his own religious vision as a defining test of allegiance.

Such a worldview can supply ideological grounds for exclusion and hostility—a framework within which enemies are categorized and confrontation presented as a duty.

Al-Houthi constructed an extensive network to transform his ideas into a mass movement. He recruited young followers, whose numbers reportedly exceeded 18,000 by the time of his death, and established religious seminaries modeled on those in Iran, incorporating Khomeini’s revolution into their curriculum. He opened more than 60 institutions across Yemen, including 24 in Saada, six in Amran, five in Al-Mahwit, 12 in Hajjah, five in the capital municipality, seven in Dhamar, one each in Ibb and Taiz, and four in Sanaa Governorate.

Drawing on Hezbollah and other political Islamist movements, he organized summer camps, seminars, lectures, and lessons, publishing booklets and books to promote his ideas. He also urged Zaydi followers to acquire weapons and ammunition to prepare for confronting enemies he described as “Americans and Jews.” He called for part of the obligatory alms, zakat, to be allocated to those defending the “honor of Islam” and the sect. Followers aged between 15 and 25 were mobilized to demonstrate at mosques after Friday prayers, chanting slogans against America and Israel. During the 2003 Iraq War, a movement-organized march toward the US Embassy resulted in deaths.

These activities combined religious instruction with political mobilization and preparation for confrontation, helping establish a sharp distinction between those portrayed as defending the faith and those depicted as threatening it.

Al-Houthi’s writings show, however, that his confrontation with the Yemeni government was not always openly declared. Before the first Houthi war broke out in 2004—a conflict he had not initially desired—he wrote to President Saleh. “We are not working against you, and we hold you in great esteem,” he wrote. “What I do stems solely from my religious and national duty to oppose the enemies of the faith and the nation: America and Israel.” “Do not listen to the alarmist claims of those with ulterior motives and the hypocrites. Rest assured that we neither plot nor conspire against you.”

The letter illustrates how Al-Houthi presented his political activities as a religious and national duty, even while seeking to reassure a government with which his movement would soon go to war.

Khomeini’s revolutionary influence extended beyond the Al-Houthi family’s visits to Tehran and years of residence there, reflecting Iran’s wider strategy of “exporting the revolution.” Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih, or guardianship of the jurist, departed from traditional Twelver Shiite thought. Zaydism has a different history—rising against unjust rulers is a foundational duty that need not await the imam’s return. Its tradition stretches from the uprising of Imam Zayd ibn Ali, who died in 122 AH (739-740 CE), to the Al-Haqq Party, which Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi and his sons helped establish. Nevertheless, Hussein Al-Houthi was captivated by Khomeini’s ideas.

In “The Danger of America’s Entry into Yemen,” he wrote: “We saw everyone who stood against the Islamic Revolution in Iran during Imam Khomeini’s time suffer the consequences of their actions, country after country. They supported Iraq against the Islamic Republic, which was and remains one of the staunchest enemies of the Americans and Israelis. Imam Khomeini, may God have mercy on him, was determined to free the Arabs and Muslims from the domination of America and Western countries, and sought to eliminate Israel. Yet everyone stood against him. We saw how those who opposed him were struck by the very powers they had helped and whose interests they had served. Kuwait was struck, and Iraq was struck.”

At an International Quds Day event, he called Khomeini “a mercy from God to the Arab nation, a blessing the Arabs failed to benefit from,” adding that the Arabs “did not appreciate this blessing; instead, they stood against him and shielded America and Israel from him.” The language reveals how Al-Houthi interpreted regional conflicts through the prism of Iran’s revolution, presenting loyalty to Khomeini’s project as inseparable from resistance to American and Israeli power.

On Feb. 23, 2012, the Houthis issued a document signed by their leader, Abdul Malik Al-Houthi, setting out their religious principles and political positions. Drawing on Hussein Al-Houthi and his father, it asserted an exclusive claim to Islam and correct belief, declaring other Muslims unbelievers. It also claimed that God had chosen the movement to revive the Muslim nation and renew the faith. That assertion of divine selection reinforces the movement’s claim to a privileged religious mandate.

Combined with its doctrine of loyalty and enmity, it offers a means of presenting political struggle as more than a contest for power—opponents can be portrayed as enemies of a religious mission rather than simply adversaries in a conflict. This is the ideological danger at the heart of the Houthi project. By claiming exclusive religious legitimacy, delegitimizing rival beliefs, and elevating confrontation with designated enemies into a sacred obligation, its founding doctrine creates a framework that can normalize hostility and help rationalize violence, including against civilians.

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