Group's slogan: “Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse upon the Jews!”

(New York, NY) – The Counter Extremism Project today released a new resource on the Houthis, Iranian-supported Shiite Muslim extremists who forced out Yemen’s president in 2015 and attacked U.S. Naval vessels with Iranian supplied cruise missiles on October 9 and 12, 2016. While unsuccessful, the attacks prompted the U.S. to launch retaliatory strikes against radar installations that had been captured by the Houthis.

The Houthis have waged a series of bloody insurgencies against the Yemeni government for more than a decade, leading a rebellion against then President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004 and rejecting a 2011 peace agreement that ended the Yemen civil war. In 2014, Houthi rebels captured Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee the country. Attempts by the United Nations to broker peace in Yemen have failed, given the Houthis’ refusal to relinquish territory they have occupied—a stipulation to end Yemen’s civil war under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2216.

Founder Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi created the al-Shabab al-Mumanin (Believing Youth) movement in the early 1990s. Originally an effort to maintain tribal autonomy in northern Yemen, the movement has widened to include opposition to perceived Western influence in the Middle East and Yemen’s support for the U.S. war on terror. The movement is known for its virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric, including the group’s ubiquitous slogan: “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

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