United Nations experts warned the Security Council that the Shiite Houthi terrorists of Yemen have received “unprecedented” international support — much of it from Iran — since the war between Israel and its allies Hamas erupted, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Sunday.
The news outlet described the report in question as a comprehensive look at the dramatic improvement in the Houthis’ technical capabilities, its dramatic recruitment surge, and its ability to disrupt global shipping through attacks on ships in the greater Red Sea area, penned by a variety of experts. The Security Council received the over 500-page report this weekend.
The experts discussed Houthi activities taking place from September 2023 — a month before the October 7, 2023, siege of Israel by Hamas that prompted the current war — to July 2024. The date is notable as the administration of President Joe Biden completed the process of unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets that month, apparently in exchange for the release of American hostages in Iran although the Biden administration insisted the exchange was “not a ransom.”
Critics of the $6 billion windfall insisted that, as cash is fungible, the money would significantly expand Iran’s ability to fund international terrorism. Iran is the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism, backing groups like Hamas and the Houthis in addition to other regional jihadists such as the Lebanese terrorists of Hezbollah and the Shiite militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq.
In April, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Congress that the unfreezing of the $6 billion likely helped Iran fund terrorists: “Any dollar they have will go towards their violent activity before they deal with their people.”
The U.N. experts documented at least 134 Houthi attacks on random ships in and around the Black Sea between November and July, a campaign Houthi leaders claim are meant to oppose Israel’s self-defense actions against Hamas in Gaza. It noted that the attacks were “indiscriminate” despite Houthi claims they were only targeting ships with ties to Israel, America, and Britain.
“The group’s shift to actions at sea increased their influence in the region,” the experts wrote. “Such a scale of attacks, using weapon systems on civilian vessels, had never occurred since the Second World War.”
The Houthi attacks on random commercial ships resulted in a 90-percent drop year-on-year in container ship traffic through the Red Sea and Suez Canal between January 2023 and 2024 and have continued disrupting shipping since. Insurance rates have skyrocketed and Egypt, in particular, has suffered from a catastrophic drop in revenue from toll payments at the Suez Canal as ships redirect away from the region and around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.
The experts noted that the Houthis had, in the span of a year, elevated their group from a regional militia fighting a civil war against a legitimate government to a global threat, largely due to “unprecedented” support from Iran.
“The panel observes the transformation of the Houthis from a localized armed group with limited capabilities to a powerful military organization, extending their operational capabilities well beyond the territories under their control,” the Associated Press (AP) quoted the report as saying.
“The scale, nature and extent of transfers of diverse military materiel and technology provided to the Houthis from external sources, including financial support and training of its combatants, is unprecedented,” it emphasized.
Iran is by far the Houthis’ top backer. The report specified that Iran used the Quds Force, the international terrorist brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to help train and offer other “technical” assistance to the Houthis. Iran had also used its diplomatic muscle to expand the Houthi presence deep into the Middle East, establishing offices in Lebanon and Iraq. Hezbollah, it added, also offered some of its experts to travel to Yemen and help train Houthi terrorists.
Alongside the technological and financial expansion, the report documented a significant increase in the number of members of the terrorist organization. Houthis had expanded recruitment with their new resources, the U.N. experts said, particularly among children. The group currently boasts 350,000 terrorists, up from 220,000 in 2022.
The Houthis emerged as a significant geopolitical threat in 2014 when they seized the capital of Yemen, Sana’a, and ousted the legitimate government. The attack started a decade-old civil war in which the legitimate government of Yemen counted on support from Saudi Arabia and a base in the southern city of Aden, while the Houthis used backing from Iran to expand their footprint in the country. They are a Shiite radical Islamist terror organization whose slogan is “Allah is great, death to the United States, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory for Islam.”
Long before Biden unfroze billions in Iranian money, in the first months of his administration, Biden removed the Houthis from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, facilitating the transfer of global funding to the Houthis. Biden administration officials insisted the move would help bring much-needed humanitarian aid to the country.
“By focusing on alleviating the humanitarian situation in Yemen, we hope the Yemeni parties can also focus on engaging in dialogue,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the time.
The Houthis eschewed any form of dialogue, instead forging closer ties to Iran and expanding attacks on neighboring Saudi Arabia. By the time the Houthis began disrupting global commerce after declaring war on Israel, Biden was facing political backlash for the 2021 decision. The president insisted in January that removing the terrorist designation was “irrelevant” to their rise in influence and claimed he did “think” they were a terrorist organization, but he never restored them to the Foreign Terrorist Organization list.
Biden also lifted other sanctions on Iran, including ending sanctions in June 2023 on three former Iranian officials and two companies sanctioned for engaging the Iranian oil industry. In October, a report citing government data from the Washington Free Beacon found that Iran received access to $200 billion in oil revenues during the Biden administration through weakening of sanctions. Iran made $37 billion in oil revenue in 2021, up from $16 billion in 2020, during Donald Trump’s presidency.
