Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to reverse his predecessor’s decision to label Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen as a terrorist organization, despite a new round of “attacks impacting civilian areas” in the days after he made that decision.
“This intent to revoke that designation has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including, as you mentioned, attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens, among other moves,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters Monday. “Our planned action … is due, as I said before, to the humanitarian consequences of this last-minute designation.”
Blinken’s team notified Congress of the decision to take the Houthis off the terrorism blacklist on Friday, only to find itself forced to demand on Sunday that the militants “immediately cease attacks impacting civilian areas inside Saudi Arabia.”
That sequence might seem to set the table for a Republican rebuke of the policy shift, but Blinken’s decision has bipartisan support.
“We saw a serious harm to the population and a very minor appreciable impact on the Iranians,” a senior Senate Republican aide said of the terror designation.
The Yemeni civil war pits Iran-backed Houthis against a Saudi Arabian-led coalition in support of the friendly Arab government overthrown in 2015. The conflict has raged without attracting the kind of international attention directed at the Syria crisis, in part because millions of displaced Yemeni civilians have remained in their country rather than seek a refugee’s life abroad. Yet the Houthis’ dominance over the levers of power in the most populous parts of the country means that a terrorism branding curtails most humanitarian work in Yemen.
“There’s no doubt that the Houthis meet the criteria for being sanctioned as a foreign terrorist organization,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior research analyst Varsha Koduvayur said. “Because they do control so much of the territory, aid organizations have no choice but to work with the Houthis in order to get necessary aid out to the Yemeni civilians.”
This dynamic has bedeviled Saudi efforts to defeat the Iran-backed militants. Yemeni civilians reached the brink of mass starvation due to a Saudi blockade of a major port city, a tactic that jeopardized the importation of food into the country even if it was intended to halt arriving shipments of Iranian weapons. Riyadh’s responsibility for civilian casualties in the conflict has eroded U.S. support for the Arab coalition, despite the U.S. consensus that Iran poses a threat in the region.
“Biden/Blinken de-listing the Houthis is a gift to Iran, doesn’t help solve Yemen & offers a path for other Iran-backed terror groups,” FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer wrote Saturday. “Make enough of a humanitarian nightmare in the territory Iran is helping you conquer, and the U.S. will prioritize the humanitarian nightmare over the terrorist activity that helped create it.”
Schanzer’s comments reflect part of the dilemma inside Yemen from an American perspective. Analysts disagree, or acknowledge their own uncertainty, about whether designating the militants as a terrorist group would help counter an Iranian proxy or allow the ayatollahs to tighten their control over the Houthis by depriving the Yemeni group of any support from sources other than Tehran.
“Does the de-listing actually [work] against U.S. interests by limiting our leverage? I am actually torn on that front,” Koduvayur said. “I don’t think we’ll have a clear answer on that until we see what the Houthis’ next moves are going to be.”
In any case, the fact that U.S. officials have to think through such a conundrum suggests that Iran already has achieved a victory in Yemen.
“If you talk about an organization that is aligned with Iran but not really requiring a lot of assistance from Iran … that’s a win from the Iranian perspective,” the Senate Republican aide said.
