Indianapolis, IN – September saw the revolution in Yemen enter a new stage. The Ansarallah movement, known in the Western press as the Houthis, secured sweeping victories all along the Red Sea coast and dealt a mighty blow to imperialism and its puppets in the region.

Beginning on September 3, Ansarallah launched a general offensive in Yemen's coastal regions to wrest control of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait from the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), the name for the U.S. and Saudi-backed puppet regime.

Days later, on September 9, Ansarallah fighters positioned in the country's highlands descended roads and riverbeds to the coastal plain and captured the port of Mokha. The Saudi-backed mercenary troops occupying the city, already battered by a month of missile and drone strikes, called for reinforcements but could not hold the line. By September 10, their troops had all run off and the port was liberated.

A day later, Ansarallah took both the Hanish Islands and Perim Island, a volcanic outcrop two miles off the Yemeni coast that narrows the shipping channel. In less than a week, the entire Red Sea coast of Yemen passed into the hands of the revolution. Ansarallah now holds the southern gate of one of the most important trade routes in the world, closing it entirely to Saudi and Israeli shipping.

Since this breakthrough, the fighting moved inland and south. Ansarallah now battles for the Kahboub mountains, which look down on both the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and the road to the key southern city of Aden. The city of Marib, which is both the center of Yemen's oil industry and the puppet regime's last stronghold in the north, has entered the revolution's crosshairs.

The offensive was Ansarallah's answer to a war Riyadh chose to restart. A UN-brokered truce had largely frozen the front lines of battle since 2022. In early July 2026, Saudi Arabia barred an Iranian plane carrying senior Ansarallah officials home from the funeral of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei from landing in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, and later bombed the airport runway. Ansarallah declared a naval blockade of Saudi ports on July 20 and has struck Saudi tankers and Aramco facilities in the months that followed.

Riyadh begs, Washington balks

Ansarallah's Red Sea offensive comes at a time of serious weakness for the Saudi oil economy, which is already pressed as a result of the U.S. war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the strait of Hormuz. On September 10, drones launched from Iraqi territory struck pumping stations along the Saudi East-West pipeline, which carries crude oil from the kingdom's eastern fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Without the strait of Hormuz, the pipeline is Saudi Arabia's only export route that avoids the Persian Gulf entirely, moving between 4 and 5 million barrels per day, representing roughly 5% of the world's oil supply. The damage forced Riyadh to shut it down. Subsequent attempts to re-open the pipeline have encountered further attacks.

The U.S. war on Iran, along with Ansarallah's revolutionary breakthrough in Yemen, has sent oil prices to the moon. Brent crude, which sold for $60 per barrel in January, climbed past $108 per barrel after the attacks. In August of 2026, Saudi Arabia reported its lowest level of crude oil production in over 35 years. These effects have spread across the world, causing fuel prices, particularly for diesel, to skyrocket. A gallon of diesel fuel is approaching $6.50 in the United States, hitting as high as $9.99 per gallon in some parts of the country.

The news of Ansarallah's lightning advances arrived as a terrible shock to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who called U.S. President Donald Trump to demand intervention after the fall of Mokha. Trump refused the Saudi request, though he promised intelligence and targeting data on top of the roughly 200 U.S. military personnel already in the kingdom.

This refusal by the U.S. was not easily accepted by the Saudis, whose existence as a regime is largely premised on the backing of Western imperialist powers. According to the New York Times, Trump ordered the Pentagon to prepare strikes on Yemen before calling them off on September 20. Even pleas by the PLC to reconsider fell on deaf ears.

European imperialists stepped in where Washington hesitated, no doubt motivated by the fuel crisis that has gripped the continent as a result of the U.S. war on Iran. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham committed on September 21 to use the Royal Air Force for refueling Saudi warplanes. France, for its part, pledged to guard Saudi energy infrastructure. On September 22, the G7 foreign ministers demanded that Ansarallah halt its attacks on Saudi Arabia.

Yemen and the camp of resistance to imperialism and Zionism

The revolution in Yemen is part of a camp of resistance to imperialism in the Middle East. Ansarallah leads the struggle in Yemen, but this united front is anchored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. This front also includes the Palestinian liberation movement, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and progressive and patriotic forces in Iraq.

When the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran in February, Ansarallah entered the fight in late March with missile and drone strikes on Israel's Ben Gurion airport.

Ansarallah and the Yemeni people have shown consistent solidarity with Palestine and paid dearly for it in blood. In November 2023, the movement seized an Israeli-linked ship and closed the Red Sea to shipping tied to Israel entirely. Over the next two years, Ansarallah targeted more than 100 merchant vessels and sank four. Container traffic through the Suez Canal fell from about 80 ships per week before the fighting to just 26. Israel's only Red Sea port saw its revenue collapse in this period before eventually shutting down. When Washington offered Ansarallah a separate truce in May 2025, the movement accepted but refused to let it cover Israel. Yemen would not trade Palestine for its own safety.

The Zionists answered with terror, with Israeli warplanes striking Sanaa and killing Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi, along with much of his cabinet, in 2025. Military chief of staff Muhammad al-Ghamari was later killed as well, along with his 13-year-old son. Today, Israel remains under blockade by Ansarallah for its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

The Red Sea offensive has opened a second chokepoint against U.S. imperialism. With Hormuz shut and Bab-el-Mandeb now in Ansarallah's hands, both sea lanes that carry Gulf oil to the world are choked by the camp of resistance. Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, called the coastal campaign a “resounding victory,” and responded to Saudi warnings to rein in Ansarallah by rightly noting that Iran does not control the actions of Yemen's leaders.

Washington is currently stretched thin by its war on Iran. Still stinging from its 2025 defeat in Yemen, the Trump administration is reluctant to reengage Ansarallah, even at the urging of its close ally. For its part, Ansarallah has shown great strategic discipline in its fight with the Saudi occupiers while maintaining its robust presence in the united front against U.S.-Zionist aggression. They have followed the terms of the ceasefire by confining the blockade to Saudi Arabia and Israel, something even Trump has publicly acknowledged. That has left Riyadh to fight alone.

Ansarallah and the National Democratic Revolution in Yemen

Ansarallah is a liberation movement that leads the national democratic revolution in Yemen today. Its base is among farmers, tribesmen, soldiers, and the urban poor of the country's highlands. Its enemies are imperialism, chiefly the U.S. and its Saudi and Emirati clients, and the comprador and feudal forces that sold Yemen out to them.

Ansarallah's ideology is based on the liberation theology of Ayatollah Khomeini as well as Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, who founded the movement, admired the Iranian revolution for its anti-imperialist character, as well as Iran and Hezbollah's resistance to U.S. and Israeli wars in the region. He was killed by Yemeni armed forces, backed by Washington, in 2004 after calling for a boycott of American and Israeli goods. His brother, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, has led the movement ever since and maintained its anti-imperialist, popular character.

While imperialist and Zionist propaganda disparagingly paints Ansarallah as a tribal or sectarian militia, the movement's program is national, democratic and unifying. Its National Vision calls for a modern, democratic, unified Yemeni republic, committed to elections, and equal rights for citizens regardless of tribal or religious identity. Ansarallah leaders, for their part, have said openly that an Islamic Republic along the lines of Iran cannot work in Yemen, owing to the population's religious diversity. In turn, the movement draws recruits across sectarian lines, confirmed in a 2015 Middle East Institute study that found Ansarallah fighters from every region and sect. Its ranks have grown from an estimated 100,000 members in 2011 to 350,000 in 2024.

Ansarallah grew out of the poorest parts of Yemen. Saada, the birthplace of the movement, carried longstanding economic and political grievances stemming from decades of marginalization, neglect, and repression by a neocolonial government loyal to Riyadh and, in turn, the United States. For three decades, Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled Yemen as a client of foreign powers. Between 2004 and 2010, his army waged war on Ansarallah's home province of Saada, backed by the U.S. under the banner of the so-called global war on terror. He was forced out after a series of mass protests in 2011, handing power to his deputy, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Ansarallah's road to power ran through a fight over the price of fuel, which erupted in July 2014 when Hadi's government cut subsidies and sent costs soaring. Mass protests demanded relief for the broad masses as well as the resignation of the government. Ansarallah entered Sanaa on September 21, 2014. Less than a year later, Hadi had resigned, fleeing to Aden and then to Riyadh, where the former regime and its supporters (wealthy sheikhs, generals, and financiers) enlisted Saudi Arabia to wage war on their own people.

When Saudi Arabia, with full U.S. backing, began its brutal genocidal war on Yemen in 2015, Saleh, the ousted leader, temporarily found himself antagonistic to his former master's interests and joined an uneasy alliance with Ansarallah. This fell apart in 2017 when Saleh switched sides again, leading to his elimination by patriotic forces in Yemen. The Presidential Leadership Council that survives today as the puppet rulers of Yemen is what remains of that old order, governing from hotel suites in Riyadh.

Today, Ansarallah leads the real government of Yemen, which administers the areas of the country where about 70% of Yemenis live. It governs from the capital, Sanaa, through the Supreme Political Council, which includes figures from outside the movement. It aims to liberate the rest of the country by driving out the Saudi-backed mercenary forces concentrated in the south and east.

Partition: The imperialist-Zionist fallback option

As the Saudi puppet regime collapses further, the old scheme of partitioning Yemen hangs over the war. It is a reactionary demand, and the class forces pushing it reveal its true purpose.

Until recently, a third force claiming to govern part of Yemen existed. The secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC), built and paid for by the United Arab Emirates, seized Hadramawt and Mahra regions in December 2025. This area accounted for roughly half of Yemen's territory and almost all of the former south. As the closest Gulf partner to Israel and a regional rival to Saudi Arabia, the UAE hoped to partition Yemen into a northern and southern state once again. Riyadh, fearing an Emirati and Israeli foothold on both sides of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, turned its own forces on the STC and crushed it in a matter of weeks, forcing Emirati forces to exit Yemen.

From 1967 to 1990, Yemen was divided into two countries: the Yemen Arab Republic in the north and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in the south. For more than two decades, the PDRY was led by Marxists, socialists, and progressives and operated as a significant counterweight to imperialism and Zionism in the Middle East. It carried out land reform and mass literacy campaigns, and armed the revolution in neighboring Oman's Dhofar province. Palestinian organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) sent fighters for training in the PDRY and received material support from the government. The country was unified in 1990 amid the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, bringing an end to the PDRY and putting the country under the sway of the Gulf monarchies.

The STC waves the flag of the PDRY, but its politics are its exact opposite. Its vice president, Hani bin Breik, was a Salafi cleric who offered STC aid to reactionary Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, who aided NATO in overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Its military was built almost entirely with Emirati money around Salafi religious fundamentalists. The STC's leading figures are Emirati clients, not the veterans of the National Liberation Front who drove the British out of Aden in the 1960s.

While antagonistic to Emirati attempts at extending its influence, Saudi Arabia's only consistent goal for over six decades has been keeping Yemen weak. It armed the reactionary Zaydi monarchy in 1962 to fight the revolutionaries and later worked with the U.S. to isolate and undermine the PDRY. After reunification, Riyadh cynically backed secessionist forces in the 1994 civil war to re-divide Yemen.

Today the Saudi puppet government officially defends unity, but if the Presidential Leadership Council is reduced to a rump in the oil-rich south and east, partition is possibly what the imperialists and their attack dogs will reach for.

As the vanguard of Yemen's national democratic revolution, Ansarallah has opposed dismemberment of the country consistently. They rejected an imperialist-backed scheme for a federalist political system, calling it a plot to divide Yemen into poor and wealthy regions to the benefit of foreign powers.

U.S. hands, Saudi crisis

The war on Yemen has been an imperialist project of the United States from the jump. Washington supplies the bombs, the intelligence, and, until 2018, the aerial refueling that has allowed the kingdom to rain death down on hundreds of thousands of Yemenis. A UN estimate at the end of 2021 put the death toll for the war at 377,000 Yemenis, with 150,000 directly killed in fighting and the remainder, mostly children, through resulting hunger and disease. The World Health Organization found that Saudi warplanes and their mercenaries on the ground deliberately targeted Yemeni water and public health infrastructure to maximize terror on civilian areas. No full count or estimate of casualties has been released since fighting resumed after a nearly four-year ceasefire.

In 2024 and 2025, the U.S. bombed Yemen directly. Trump's Operation Rough Rider savaged Yemen with 339 airstrikes on more than 1000 targets for 52 days, In April 2025, a U.S. strike on the Ras Isa fuel port killed 80 civilians, mostly port workers. A little over a week later, another U.S. air strike on a migrant detention center in Saada killed 68 African migrants. The Pentagon officially admits over 150 civilian deaths, while independent monitors put the number higher.

Operation Rough Rider was a failure. On May 6, 2025, Trump called it off and accepted a ceasefire with Ansarallah despite vowing to annihilate the movement at the outset of war. Even as it has resisted rejoining combat operations out of fear, the White House still backs the Saudi counter-offensive to the hilt. May 2025 saw a $142 billion arms deal announced between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, including the sale of F-35 jets.

Ansarallah's sweeping Red Sea offensive is bringing the internal crisis in Saudi Arabia to a head as well. The U.S. is losing its criminal war on Iran, which has opened all of the Gulf monarchies up to sweeping retaliation. Riyadh is under fire from all sides. Its alliance with the UAE turned into open war in southern Yemen. Its oil exports are cut off at both ends of the peninsula. Recent Saudi attempts to reverse Ansarallah's gains along the Red Sea have also failed, and its forces in Marib are besieged.

The most decisive moment in Yemen's revolution for over a decade is unfolding. Its successes strike a mighty blow to both imperialism and Zionism, and the liberation of the whole country will strengthen the camp of resistance.

#International #Yemen #Ansarallah #Houthis #SaudiArabia #Palestine #Featured