The rise of Yemen's Houthis

 Shia rebels who fought several wars against the government have made significant gains since President Saleh ceded power.



The Houthis could well be the biggest winners following the recent
upheaval in Yemen. Before the beginning of the uprising against the
regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011 the group barely had any
hopes of expanding so quickly both as a major military force and as a
relatively accepted political entity within other parts of Yemen.

In
terms of religion, the Houthis are part of the Shia Zaidi, a branch of
the Shia Imamiya of Iran. The Zaidi believe that Muslims should be ruled
only by a descendant of Prophet Muhammad whom they call an Imam. Yemen
was ruled by such Imams for more than 1,000 years and their rule ended
only in 1962.

This is interesting because the Zaidi do not
represent a majority in Yemen. But the ideological differences between
them and the Sunni Shafi'i majority are not as big as in the cases of
Iraq and Iran. Both sects harmoniously lived together and prayed in the
same mosques for hundreds of years.

Now, the Houthis are seen as a
diversion, or an extremist offshoot that was only recently hatched amid
a delicate political context and ironically many fingers point to their
archenemy, former President Saleh, as the man behind their inception.

The
Houthi movement metamorphosed in the same manner as the Taliban from a
religious school into a religious military ideology. The school was
allegedly sponsored by the former president and built in Saada, a remote
province in northern Yemen, in the late 1990s. Saleh's idea was to form
a generation of religious fighters who could stand in the face of Sunni
Muslim Saudi Arabia's territorial expansionist aspirations and
sometimes "aggressions" against Yemen. At that time Yemen accused the
Saudis of repeatedly encroaching on swathes of land along the yet
unofficial borderline between the two countries.

But the Imam of
the school, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, had other plans in mind.
Hussein was the son of a prominent Imam of the Shia Zaidi of Yemen, and
was said to have been influenced by the Iranian revolution. He turned
the school into a breeding ground for a generation of hardline religious
zealots. This coincided with the rise of other formerly marginalised
Shia minorities in the Middle East, such as in Bahrain and Lebanon.

The rise of Yemen's Houthis - Al Jazeera Blogs