Who are the Houthis?

About a month ago, a regional brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the militia that undergirds the power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, held a political conference in the port city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. The keynote speaker was a surprise for most attendees: Salim al-Montasser, an envoy of Yemen’s Houthis, who the UK and the US targeted in airstrikes last night. The Houthis are a Shia militia that holds power in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and is regarded as the sovereign Yemeni government by Tehran (but not by the Arab League or the international community).

Al-Montasser was profuse in his endorsement of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for whom he used the title of ‘Imam,’ an especially sacred designation for Shia Muslims which, in modern terms, has only been used to refer to Khamenei’s predecessor, the regime founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khamenei’s continual foresight, al-Montasser claimed, had pre-guaranteed the eventual victory of the Axis of Resistance, the grouping of anti-Israel militias led by Iran.