The shit is going down hard in Yemen right now, and it's looking a lot like war. The Saudis are making major moves, kicking off the latest escalation with a foiled airstrike on the Sanaa International Airport in July that targeted a contingency of officials with the ruling Houthi rebels returning from the Ayatollah's funeral and then responding to the Houthis subsequent blockade earlier this month with hundreds of airstrikes across Yemen.
The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, for their part are making major moves of their own. Making heavy gains on the ground in Yemen against long-entrenched, Saudi-backed militias and launching a wave of drone and missile strikes across southwest Arabia, doing significant damage to the Saudi's pipelines and setting all manner of oil infrastructure ablaze like a thousand candles in the desert.
America isn't just getting in on the action; they seem to be orchestrating much of it from the rafters, sending in hundreds of American military "advisors" to the Holy Land, not to mention essentially micromanaging Saudi Arabia's entire air force whose fleet of American made F-15's would be about as lethal as paperweights without careful American maintenance and refueling. America also appears to have provided the match that lit this fire, greenlighting the Sanaa hit job with some lame excuse about Iranian advisors hiding in the Houthi's luggage compartment.
So, everybody appears to be playing their chosen roles in what very much looks like the beginnings of another American sponsored forever war in the Middle East but everybody but Ansar Allah appears to be dragging their feet when they aren't busy desperately trying to the stomp out the fire they started.
The Saudis seemed to spend weeks actively pretending like none of this was even fucking happening even with blood up to their tits. After launching 121 airstrikes on Houthi territory in Yemen in one day, Saudi officials made the absurd claim that their dickless proxies inside Yemen were behind those Top Gun attacks even though it's common knowledge that those Keystone fedayeen can't even operate a hot air balloon, and even with a third of their country in flames, Riyadh continues to try to downplay the rapidly expanding carnage in the international media when they acknowledge it all.
What's even more curious is the fact that the Saudis appeared to have attempted to walk back their own poorly flubbed assault on the Sanaa International Airport all summer with Bloomberg reporting on talks between the Saudis and the Houthis held through Oman as late as August. One would not be unwise to point the finger at the Saudis' sugar daddies back in Washington, especially considering that this latest escalation not only comes at a time in which Trump is running out of options in his increasingly humiliating duel with the Houthis' allies in Tehran, but also because it comes off the heels of an American agreement to help the Saudis to establish the kind of nuclear program that we allegedly killed the Ayatollah over.
But America seems to be stumbling over its own bombs to distance themselves from the war raging in Yemen as well, with Donald Trump recently claiming to have spoken with Ansar Allah on the phone well after they retaliated against our friends in the House of Saud and then suggesting that the ceasefire he signed with the Houthi regime in 2025 was still in effect. It has also been reported by Axios that Trump had declined to provide the Saudis with direct air support even after a besieged Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman begged him personally over the phone.
None of the people who started this war seem to be the least bit interested in being seen fighting it. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that none of them really has anything substantial to gain from the violence. Once again, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which Pax-Americana and its various dependents are getting blown up or blowing shit up in a clusterfuck that only Israel stands to gain from. Lest we forget, Ansar Allah very effectively used their territorial position on the Bab el-Mandab Strait connecting the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea to put severe financial pressure on Israel and its sponsors over their genocidal operation in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu shows every sign of plotting to expand the Nakba to the Houthis' fellow Shiites in Lebanon and Syria in the near future.
However, I strongly suspect that America and Saudi Arabia's reluctance to publicly go to war with Ansar Allah is much bigger than Israel and Trump and Bibi and Jeffrey Epstein's corpse. The most powerful empire on the planet and one of their most depraved attack dogs in the Middle East appear to be afraid of a third world militia that governs a territory smaller than Massachusetts in the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. We are talking about Donald Trump and MBS here. A serial rapist and a psychopathic boy-king who takes apart his critics with power tools. What exactly are these monsters so afraid of? What is so goddamn terrifying about going toe to toe with a Houthi rebel?
To put it succinctly, these bearded Arab bad men appear to be unbreakable. The United States and Saudi Arabia have been waging total war against these motherfuckers for decades and every bomb we drop just seems to make them stronger. For nearly seven years, between 2015 and 2022, America financed and facilitated a genocidal siege against Yemen and the Saudis systematically carried it out. Thousands of tons of American made ordinances battered the ancient hillside villages and tightly populated port cities of that tiny nation while a total blockade cut the survivors off from an outside world that stood by and watched it happen with their hands in their pockets.
Somewhere between 230,000 and 380,000 people were killed. 150,000 of them from direct acts of violence, the rest from treatable disease and famine. 70% of the dead are believed to have been children under the age of 5.
But the Houthis didn't flinch. Even beneath a driving rain of relentless bombing, they kicked the shit out of the Saudis and the best mercenaries' oil can buy on the ground, rarely giving up more than an inch of territory before taking it back. Contrary to western propaganda, their exists very little evidence of Ansar Allah receiving anything in the way of significant funding from Iran or anyone else for that matter. Nearly every weapon they wield they either lifted from dead bodies and dead regimes, or they made themselves amongst the ruins from literal garbage and the bombs that dropped on their heads.
By the time Israel began its latest genocidal onslaught in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis were a well-honed guerrilla machine fully capable of going on the offensive. After launching a blockade of their own in the Red Sea in solidarity with fellow genocide victims, America decided to get involved directly, first with Biden's Operation Prosperity Garden in 2024 and then with a much more merciless bombing spree under Donald Trump.
Another 250+ civilians were slaughtered, but the Houthis simply expanded the Red Sea blockade and shut the entire waterway down. Within months Trump was signing a ceasefire with these proud pirates even as they continued nail the Israeli targets we had supposedly been bombing Yemen to protect.
This winning streak has continued into the latest Saudi confrontation which the Houthis have merely used as an excuse to pick up more territory in the nation they run. Within a week of Saudi Arabia's first mass bombing spree since 2022, Ansar Allah has made significant gains in capturing what little of the Red Sea coastline they hadn't taken already, laying siege to the strategic port city of Mocha along with several islands in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
Seeing the writing on the temple walls written in the blood of cowards, Israel seems to be stepping up their involvement behind the scenes, but it can only get worse for them from here as they are already stretched far too thin killing other people's children closer to home and their MAGA golem is currently drowning in two feet of water in another strait one desert over.
So, what is it? What is the big secret that makes the Houthi rebels harder to kill than werewolves on angel dust? Simply put, they are not a state, they are a movement, a tribal culture defined by local resistance to global superpowers whose roots in their rugged region go back to antiquity. The modern Houthi movement is a Zaydi revivalist subculture formed by the Al-Houthi clan who can trace their lineage back to the foundation of that branch of Shia Islam which emerged in the 8th century to confront the rule of the massive Umayyad Caliphate.
Zaydism would go on to form the foundation of political and cultural life in the rugged northern highlands of Yemen for nearly a millennium with its imams fiercely resisting integration into the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Local tribal rule was only interrupted by the foundation of the northern Yemen Arab Republic in 1962 which very quickly became a hub for genocidal Salafi extremists and the western oilmen who love them, but the Zaydis persisted and under Houthi spiritual guidance, they crushed the local chapter of Al-Qaeda before overturning two Saudi/American backed dictators in a row. And the rest is history.
And history is the key to comprehending this movement, not politics. No empire, state or army can crush a movement whose history predates empires, states and armies. The Houthis cannot be removed from the land because they belong to the land and not vice versa. There's is a culture determined by localism and bioregional spirituality above praxis or dogma and that is how you survive an empire.
I can't help but to feel like we can all learn from this example, like Ansar Allah is our era's equivalent to the Seminole Nation or the Zaporizhian Sich. This may not be traditional anarchism, but what exactly is traditional anarchism? Some one-horse union regurgitating the religiosity of a few dead white Russians? Give me an unbowed tribe with an inextinguishable fire over the campus flavor of the 19th century any day. I'm a Queer hillbilly. My people want justice in the holler right now and Zaydi Muslims are the only tribe getting it in 2026.
Maybe it's time we all started fighting back like a Houthi rebel.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Stutter by Elastica
* Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges
* Shove by L7
* Dot Dash by Wire
* Search & Destroy by Iggy & the Stooges
* Waiting Room by Fugazi
* The Boys are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy
* Atmosphere by Joy Division
* Son of a Gun by Nirvana
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