www.washingtonpost.com Open in urlscan Pro
23.45.108.250  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Accessibility statementSkip to main content

Democracy Dies in Darkness
SubscribeSign in



Advertisement


Close
The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness
Israel-Gaza WarLive updates Israeli hostages Gaza devastation ICJ genocide case
Who are the Houthis?
Israel-Gaza WarLive updates Israeli hostages Gaza devastation ICJ genocide case
Who are the Houthis?



AS HOUTHIS VOW TO FIGHT ON, U.S. PREPARES FOR SUSTAINED CAMPAIGN


OFFICIALS SAY THEY DON’T EXPECT OPERATIONS IN YEMEN TO LAST YEARS, BUT THEY
ACKNOWLEDGE IT’S UNCLEAR WHEN THE GROUP’S MILITARY CAPABILITY WILL BE
SUFFICIENTLY ERODED

By Missy Ryan
, 
John Hudson
and 
Abigail Hauslohner
Updated January 20, 2024 at 6:51 p.m. EST|Published January 20, 2024 at 6:26
p.m. EST
Houthi supporters rally against U.S. government
0:56

Thousands of Houthi supporters on Jan. 19 attended a rally in Sanaa, Yemen to
protest against the U.S. government designating Houthis as a terror group.
(Video: Reuters)

Listen
10 min

Share
Comment on this storyComment3043
Add to your saved stories
Save

The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign
targeting the Houthis in Yemen after 10 days of strikes failed to halt the
group’s attacks on maritime commerce, stoking concern among some officials that
an open-ended operation could derail the war-ravaged country’s fragile peace and
pull Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict.



Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between
in politics.ArrowRight


The White House convened senior officials on Wednesday to discuss options for
the way ahead in the administration’s evolving response to the Iranian-backed
movement, which has vowed to continue attacking ships off the Arabian peninsula
despite near-daily operations to destroy Houthi radars, missiles and drones. On
Saturday, U.S. Central Command announced its latest strike, on an anti-ship
missile that was prepared for launch.



The deepening cycle of violence is a setback to President Biden’s goal of
stemming spillover hostilities triggered by Israel’s war against Hamas in the
Gaza Strip. Underscoring the threat, Iran on Saturday blamed Israel for a strike
on the Syrian capital, Damascus, that killed five Iranian military advisers. The
Israeli military declined to comment. In Iraq, an attack on Ain al-Asad air
base, which hosts Iraqi and U.S. troops, left one Iraqi soldier seriously
injured, according to a Defense Department official. An Iran-linked faction
there said it was responsible.

Advertisement

Story continues below advertisement


Skip to end of carousel


ISRAEL-GAZA WAR

(Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)
U.S. naval forces launched three additional strikes against Houthi forces in
Yemen on Friday, targeting anti-ship missiles, according to U.S. officials. In
the Gaza Strip, internet and cellphone communications were gradually restored,
ending a week-long outage that kept most of the territory’s 2.1 million people
cut off, amid a war and humanitarian crisis.
For context: Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war.

End of carousel

The Houthis, one powerful faction in Yemen’s long-running civil war, have framed
their campaign, which has included more than 30 missile and drone attacks on
commercial and naval vessels since November, as a means of pressuring Israel,
bolstering their standing amid widespread regional opposition to the Jewish
state. The quickly expanding U.S. response likewise risks pulling Biden into
another volatile campaign in a region that has repeatedly mired down the
American military, potentially undermining his attempt to refocus U.S. foreign
policy on Russia and China.

Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss
internal deliberations, described their strategy in Yemen as an effort to erode
the Houthis’ high-level military capability enough to curtail their ability to
target shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden or, at a minimum, to provide a
sufficient deterrent so that risk-averse shipping companies will resume sending
vessels through the region’s waterways.

“We are clear-eyed about who the Houthis are, and their worldview,” a senior
U.S. official said of the group, which the Biden administration designated this
week as a terrorist organization. “So we’re not sure that they’re going to stop
immediately, but we are certainly trying to degrade and destroy their
capabilities.”

Advertisement

Story continues below advertisement



Biden this week acknowledged that the strikes had so far failed to discourage
Houthi leaders, who have promised to exact revenge against the United States and
Britain, whose military has contributed to the strikes in Yemen.

“Are they stopping the Houthis? No,” the president told reporters. “Will they
continue? Yes.”



Officials say they don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years
like previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. At the same time they
acknowledge they can identify no end date or provide an estimate for when the
Yemenis’ military capability will be adequately diminished. As part of the
effort, U.S. naval forces also are working to intercept weapons shipments from
Iran.

Story continues below advertisement



The Houthis, who made an unlikely rise from an obscure rebel movement in Yemen’s
northern mountains in the 1990s to ruling large swaths of the country by 2015,
previously withstood years of bombing by a military coalition led by Saudi
Arabia.

Advertisement


“We’re not trying to defeat the Houthis. There’s no appetite for invading
Yemen,” a diplomat close to the issues said. “The appetite is to degrade their
ability to launch these kind of attacks going forward, and that involves hitting
the infrastructure that enables these kind of attacks, and targeting their
higher-level capabilities.”

The first U.S. official said the initial U.S. and British strikes had succeeded
“in significantly degrading” the military assets targeted thus far, but also
acknowledged they retain a consequential arsenal. “That’s not to say that the
Houthis don’t still have capability, but there’s a lot that they had that they
don’t have now,” he said.

Story continues below advertisement



Western officials believe the most advanced equipment is provided by Iran, which
they say has conducted a years-long smuggling operation that has allowed them to
strike far beyond Yemen’s borders. The United States is hoping that the strikes,
in conjunction with its interdiction campaign that last week yielded a shipment
of missile warheads, will slowly starve the Houthis of their most potent
weapons.

Advertisement


They point out that more sophisticated attacks, like a large-scale one that
occurred Jan. 9, have not been repeated since the U.S.-led strikes began.
“Recall before the strike we had U.S. ships attacked with 20-plus UAVs and
multiple missiles in a single attack,” a second American official said, using a
military acronym for drone aircraft.

The Houthis now appear to be receiving targeting assistance from Iran, the first
official said. He described the group’s approach to attacking ships in the Red
Sea and the Gulf of Aden as “inconsistent”: sometimes they seem to have clearly
identified the nationality and affiliations of the vessels they target; in other
instances they do not.

Story continues below advertisement



Officials said that ideology, rather than economics, was a chief driver of
Biden’s decision to mount the current campaign. While the attacks have so far
taken a greater toll on Europe than the United States, which relies on Pacific
trade routes more than those in the Middle East, the Houthi campaign is already
beginning to reshape the global shipping map. Some firms have chosen to reroute
ships around the Cape of Good Hope off southern Africa, while major oil
companies including BP and Shell suspended shipments through the area.

Advertisement


The officials said Biden believed the United States had to act as what they
described as the world’s “indispensable nation,” with a powerful military and an
ability to organize diverse nations behind a single cause. Nations including
Canada, Bahrain, Germany and Japan jointly issued a statement on Jan. 3 decrying
the Houthi actions.

Share this articleShare

They compared Biden’s decision to confront the Houthis to his stance in support
of Ukraine, where he has authorized billions of dollars in weapons donations to
help Kyiv push back against Russia’s breach of its sovereignty, a major
violation of global norms.

Story continues below advertisement



In this case, officials said, the administration is willing to safely transit
key waterways and, more generally, defend the principle of freedom of
navigation. They hope the signal sent by preemptive American strikes will
convince shipping firms to return to business as usual.

Advertisement


“It’s impossible to forecast exactly what’s going to happen, and certainly not
[to predict] future operations,” the first U.S. official said. “But the
principle that it simply can’t be tolerated for a terrorist organization … with
these advanced capabilities to essentially shut down or control shipping through
a key international choke point is one that we feel very strongly about.”

Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen expert with the Navanti Group, said the Houthis have
strong incentive to press on.

Story continues below advertisement



“When the Houthis attacked the Abu Dhabi airport, they garnered a lot of
attention. When they attacked Aramco they garnered even more attention,” he
said, referring to attacks in the United Arab Emirates and on oil facilities in
Saudi Arabia. “But the attention they’re getting today from the Red Sea attacks
is unheard of, so they are loving this.”

Advertisement


The administration has tried to avoid being seen as fueling regional violence by
working to build international support, including by finding partners to sign on
for declarations condemning the Houthi violence and by securing passage of a
U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing their actions a day before the
initial U.S. strikes. This week, the administration imposed a terrorism
designation on the group.

State Department spokesman Matt Miller said the nations who have joined the
United States in seeking to counter the Houthi violence were all playing
“different roles.”

“There are more than 40 countries that issued a statement making clear that they
condemned the Houthis’ attacks. There is a coalition of more than 20 countries
that we assembled … to defend against the Houthis’ attacks,” Miller said.



Some U.S. officials have voiced fears about the U.S. military’s intervention,
worried it could unravel the hard-fought diplomatic gains aimed at ending the
war in Yemen or exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation in the Arab
world’s poorest country.

Advertisement

Story continues below advertisement



Some officials at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International
Development remain concerned the U.S. assault could result in the Houthis
expanding their strikes against Saudi assets — in particular oil refineries —
and derail efforts to forge a peace settlement to end the nine-year war in Yemen
that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused one of the world’s
worst humanitarian disasters.

There are still several steps that haven’t been taken to solidify a peace
settlement between the Houthis and the Saudis, including a payment mechanism to
former Houthi fighters that are now acting in local administrator roles.
Measures like that become more difficult to establish amid active hostilities
between U.S. and Houthi forces.

U.S. officials also are concerned that attacking the Houthis has thrust the
United States into a conflict with little exit strategy and limited support from
key allies. Notably, America’s most powerful Gulf partners have withheld their
backing for the American operation. The prime minister of Qatar, a key U.S. ally
in the Gulf, has warned that Western strikes would not halt the violence and
could fuel regional instability.

“We need to address the central issue, which is Gaza, in order to get everything
else defused … If we are just focusing on the symptoms and not treating the real
issues, (solutions) will be temporary,” he said, according to Reuters.
Palestinian authorities say that Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which the country
launched following Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attacks into Israel, has killed more
than 24,000 people.

While U.S. lawmakers have been broadly supportive of the strikes in Yemen, they
said the administration has yet to outline a clear strategy or endgame, and
suggested the strikes have not eliminated concerns about an escalating Middle
East conflict. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, told reporters following a meeting with Secretary of State Antony
Blinken in recent days that the administration’s plan for addressing the threat
appeared to be “evolving.”

Legislators also voiced fears the operation could become costly and prolonged.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted
that some of the missiles employed to date could cost $2 million apiece. “So
you’ve got this issue that will be emerging of how long can we continue to fire
expensive missiles,” he said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) noted that the United States had attempted to
weaken other groups in the past, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, even as they
rearmed. “The Houthis were rebuilding even as the Saudis bombed them [for
years]. So it’s sobering,” Blumenthal said.

“There’s no question,” he added, “that we should be very clear-eyed about the
difficulties here.”

Ellen Francis in Beirut, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Louisa Loveluck in
Jerusalem contributed to this report.


ISRAEL-GAZA WAR

U.S. naval forces launched three additional strikes against Houthi forces in
Yemen on Friday morning, targeting anti-ship missiles, according to National
Security Council spokesman John Kirby. In the Gaza Strip, internet and cellphone
communications were gradually restored, ending a week-long outage that kept most
of the territory’s 2.1 million people cut off, amid a war and humanitarian
crisis.

Pakistan launched retaliatory strikes Thursday on militants in Iran, its Foreign
Ministry said, as tensions in the Middle East appeared to be spreading.

Oct. 7 attack: Hamas spent more than a year planning its assault on Israel. A
Washington Post video analysis shows how Hamas exploited vulnerabilities created
by Israel’s reliance on technology at the “Iron Wall,” the security barrier
bordering the Gaza Strip, to carry out the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
Stock traders earned millions of dollars anticipating the Hamas attack, a study
found.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has a complicated
history. Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war and read about the history
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Show more
ChevronDown
Share
3043 Comments
Israel-Gaza war
HAND CURATED
 * U.S. launches more strikes on Houthis; communications restored in Gaza after
   week-long outage
   January 19, 2024
   
   
   U.S. launches more strikes on Houthis; communications restored in Gaza after
   week-long outage
   January 19, 2024
 * Pakistan fires retaliatory strikes at Iran, raising fears of new conflict
   January 18, 2024
   
   
   Pakistan fires retaliatory strikes at Iran, raising fears of new conflict
   January 18, 2024
 * Fighting in central Gaza rages on amid hostage families’ growing doubts
   January 18, 2024
   
   
   Fighting in central Gaza rages on amid hostage families’ growing doubts
   January 18, 2024

View 3 more stories



Loading...


Subscribe to comment and get the full experience. Choose your plan →


Advertisement



Advertisement

TOP STORIES
World news
Essential reporting from around the world
A Belgian port seized tons of cocaine. Criminals tried to take it back.


Breaking protection pledge, Russian regions reinstate animal kill shelters


A kitchen table amputation without anesthetic in Gaza is one of many


Refresh
Try a different topic

Sign in or create a free account to save your preferences
Advertisement


Advertisement

Company
About The Post Newsroom Policies & Standards Diversity & Inclusion Careers Media
& Community Relations WP Creative Group Accessibility Statement Sitemap
Get The Post
Become a Subscriber Gift Subscriptions Mobile & Apps Newsletters & Alerts
Washington Post Live Reprints & Permissions Post Store Books & E-Books Print
Archives (Subscribers Only) Today’s Paper Public Notices Coupons
Contact Us
Contact the Newsroom Contact Customer Care Contact the Opinions Team Advertise
Licensing & Syndication Request a Correction Send a News Tip Report a
Vulnerability
Terms of Use
Digital Products Terms of Sale Print Products Terms of Sale Terms of Service
Privacy Policy Cookie Settings Submissions & Discussion Policy RSS Terms of
Service Ad Choices
washingtonpost.com © 1996-2024 The Washington Post
 * washingtonpost.com
 * © 1996-2024 The Washington Post
 * About The Post
 * Contact the Newsroom
 * Contact Customer Care
 * Request a Correction
 * Send a News Tip
 * Report a Vulnerability
 * Download the Washington Post App
 * Policies & Standards
 * Terms of Service
 * Privacy Policy
 * Cookie Settings
 * Print Products Terms of Sale
 * Digital Products Terms of Sale
 * Submissions & Discussion Policy
 * RSS Terms of Service
 * Ad Choices
 * Coupons









WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY

We and our 36 partners store and/or access information on a device, such as
unique IDs in cookies to process personal data. You may accept or manage your
choices by clicking below, including your right to object where legitimate
interest is used, or at any time in the privacy policy page. These choices will
be signaled to our partners and will not affect browsing data.


WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS DATA TO PROVIDE:

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use limited data to
select advertising. Store and/or access information on a device. Use limited
data to select content. Personalised advertising and content, advertising and
content measurement, audience research and services development. List of
Partners (vendors)

I Accept Reject All Show Purposes