Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi terror group appears to be well-positioned to shield its leaders from retaliatory strikes recently threatened by Israel, international researchers tell Voice Of America radio station.
The Biden administration had labeled the Houthis a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization last January, citing their use of missiles supplied by Iran to attack Red Sea shipping. President Donald Trump, who took office this week, signed an order on Wednesday starting a month long process of further penalizing the Houthis with a designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
After Israel’s latest Yemen strike on Jan. 10, Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a videotaped warning to Houthi leaders, saying Israel will “hunt you down” – repeating a threat that he first made last month to “decapitate” the Houthi leadership.
The Houthi leader is known for being elusive and issuing videotaped statements from undisclosed locations.
Mohammed Albasha, a Yemeni American founder of U.S.-based consultancy Basha Report that specializes in Middle East and North Africa risk assessments, told VOA that he has not observed any public meetings involving al-Houthi in Yemen since 2015.
In a series of interviews for this report, Albasha and other international researchers specializing in Yemen said they suspect that the Houthi rebels leader has been hiding for years in the mountains of his clan’s home base of Saada province in northwestern Yemen, along with other senior figures of his militia.
“I don’t think Israeli threats have changed the behavior of Houthi leaders much,” said Wolf-Christian Paes, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Ely Karmon, a researcher at Israel’s International Institute for Counterterrorism, said Houthi leaders appear to have tightened those precautions in response to recent developments, including Israel’s five strikes on Yemen, dozens of U.S.-led strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen since last January, and Israeli attacks on Iranian proxy leaders elsewhere in the region.
April Longley Alley, a researcher at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said the Houthis also are likely to be skeptical of using transmitting technology anywhere near their top leader.
Beyond the Houthis’ home base in Saada, the militia has a political leadership running an internationally unrecognized authority in Sanaa, called the Supreme Political Council.
Albasha,said the council’s prime minister and other ministers are not involved in military matters and operate under the authority of the militia’s senior commanders from Saada and the Houthi clan.
The researchers said Houthi political leaders and spokesmen appear regularly in public in Sanaa, but typically in settings with many civilians present, giving those officials a human shield from potential aerial attacks.
But the researchers said the Houthis’ tactics for shielding their leaders from attack also have drawbacks.
“Houthi military leaders are going to be very skeptical of using phones, and that is likely going to make it harder and more time consuming for them to exchange messages between Saada and Sanaa,” Longley Alley said.
The researchers said it is harder for Israel to strike leaders of the Houthis than those of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy groups located nearer its borders because Yemen is more than 2,000 kilometers away. That distance requires several hours of flight time for Israeli warplanes to reach their targets, versus minutes for the same warplanes to reach neighboring territories.
They said Israel also lacks in Yemen the same kind of human intelligence sources that it established in Lebanon and Palestinian territories before the start of the recent conflict, when it perceived Yemen to be a relatively low threat.
Karmon, the counterterrorism researcher, said that if the ceasefire in Gaza holds and the Houthis refrain from firing more projectiles at Israel in the coming weeks and months, he expects Israel to focus on closing what he called a “huge” intelligence gap in Yemen.
He said Israel could utilize long-range drones, satellites, human sources and intelligence-sharing with the U.S. and regional partners to do that.