The Limits of Iran’s Proxy Empire

On February 28th, just hours after the United States and Israel struck Iran, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the supreme leader of Yemen’s Houthi movement, gave a speech denouncing the attacks as “a blatant, criminal, and barbaric act targeting the Muslim Iranian people.” He expressed “complete solidarity” with Iran and urged the entire Muslim world to apply pressure, of all forms, on the U.S. and Israel. The following day, at his behest, tens of thousands of people in Yemen took to the streets to protest the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They carried portraits of the cleric and condemned America and Israel, using language that mirrored the Houthis’ motto: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”

The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite Islamist rebel group, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, are among Iran’s most powerful and resilient allies. They are a key part of the so-called Axis of Resistance, an informal Iran-led military coalition in the Middle East. During his speech, al-Houthi suggested that the Houthis were ready to lend military support to Iran: “We are fully prepared for any necessary developments,” he said. And yet, as the war continues into its second week, the Houthis are essentially M.I.A.

Iran’s other proxies, meanwhile, have done little to bolster Tehran in the war. Hezbollah, the paramilitary group in Lebanon, got involved in the conflict, disregarding the state’s sovereignty and firing missiles and drones from Lebanese territory at an Israeli military site near Haifa. The projectiles fell short, but Israel carried out retaliatory strikes in Beirut and across Lebanon, killing at least six hundred people, including ninety-one children, injuring more than a thousand, and displacing some eight hundred thousand. In Iraq, pro-Iranian Shiite militias have attempted a series of small-scale drone and rocket attacks at Israel, and have targeted U.S. forces and personnel in Erbil and Baghdad, and in Jordan. But few of these have caused damage. “Their capabilities remain limited and not consequential at all,” Renad Mansour, a senior fellow and the project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told me.

This was not what Iran envisioned when it began developing the Axis of Resistance, in the nineteen-eighties, pouring billions of dollars into cultivating a network that would help defend its borders, deter its enemies, and project influence across the region. The coalition started with Hezbollah, in 1982, which Iran helped establish in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. It eventually expanded to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Syria; various Iraqi Shiite militias, such as the Popular Mobilization Forces; and Sunni militants, including Hamas. The Houthis, once a little-known insurgent group in northern Yemen, became a major military and political force after the Arab Spring, using nationwide unrest and government instability to seize large swaths of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. With the help of Iran, which provided training in addition to ballistic missiles and other advanced weaponry, the Houthis became adept at asymmetric warfare, using low-cost, high-impact methods like drones and rockets against more well-resourced militaries. With such tactics, they survived a years-long bombing campaign by a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition seeking to reinstall Yemen’s elected government.

All of Iran’s proxies share a deep ideological hatred of Israel and America. “The logic of the proxies for Iran, primarily, was this idea of forward defense, which meant that, instead of fighting in Iran, let’s do our fighting in other areas,” Mansour explained. But now that Iran is engaged in “a direct fight against the U.S. and Israel and its interests across the region,” he continued, these allied groups are “less necessary.”

Still, the Houthis could be especially valuable to Iran during the current conflict, as the group has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to withstand U.S. and Israeli strikes. This includes two American-led campaigns against Yemen—first under the Biden Administration, in 2src24, then under the Trump Administration, last year, which pummelled Houthi positions and weapons arsenals for months. Not only did the group remain intact but their survival may have bolstered their image in Yemen and their grip on the country.

Were the Houthis to get involved now, they could open several new fronts in the war at once. The group could fire drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, as it has done before, shutting down a vital shipping lane that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Significant amounts of the world’s crude oil, liquefied natural gas, manufactured goods, electronics, and food flow through this passage. Shutting it down—coupled with Iran’s choking off the Strait of Hormuz—could suffocate global trade, cause oil and energy prices to soar even higher, and prompt stock-market crashes all over the world, putting added pressure on the Trump Administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war. Already, some shippers are avoiding the Red Sea route, anticipating Houthi attacks. (Last spring, as the U.S. struck Yemen, the Houthis claimed to have launched missiles and drones at the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, an American aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.) The Houthis could also fire long-range missiles at Israel, and target Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations—including their oil, energy, and economic infrastructure—from the south, as Iran strikes these countries from the north, in a joint pincer movement.

It’s possible that the plan is for the Houthis to join the conflict later on, if there is a long-drawn-out war, and if the Gulf countries, which so far have been focussed on protecting themselves from Iranian strikes, go on the offensive. (On Saturday, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian President, apologized to the Gulf states for its strikes, but the attacks have persisted.) Mohammed al-Basha, a Middle East politics-and-security expert, told me that the Houthis have been readying themselves for action. In recent weeks, he and other analysts have been told that the Houthis have deployed missile launchers, drone-operating units, and military brigades throughout northern Yemen—from the Red Sea coastlines to the border with Saudi Arabia. The group is also said to be digging tunnels, building bunkers, and erecting barriers and other defensive structures in case of an attack by the United States and Israel. Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst for Yemen for the International Crisis Group, told me that Iran and its proxies believe in “gradual escalation,” understanding that it is perhaps not “wise to use your wild cards all at once.” The Houthis are Iran’s biggest wild card. And so the fact that the group has not yet entered the war can only be seen as “a calculated choice,” one that has been “fully coördinated with the Iranians,” Nagi said. “They believe that Iran, for now, can manage the situation and face all these challenges alone.” But, if the conflict widens even more, he added, “the Houthis will jump in. They need some time to assess the situation before joining the fight.”

That need to assess speaks to the enormous shifts that are currently under way in the Middle East, as Israel and the U.S. remake the region. It also unveils the struggle within Iran’s constellation of proxies to remain relevant, as their primary benefactor faces its greatest existential threat since its war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Their calculus on whether to enter the war is shaped by several questions: Can they survive U.S. and Israeli retaliation, including attacks targeting their senior leaders? Do they possess enough missiles and drones, and the ability to build or acquire more advanced weapons, to sustain a prolonged war and defense? Will they be weakened domestically by entering the war? And is there something to gain—politically, economically, or diplomatically—by avoiding conflict?

Last June, during the Twelve-Day War—when Israel attacked Iran and the U.S. later joined in, striking Iranian nuclear facilities—the answers to these questions persuaded Iran’s proxies to remain largely on the sidelines. By then, significant cracks in the Axis of Resistance had emerged. In 2src2src, an American drone strike had assassinated General Qassem Suleimani, who oversaw support for Iran’s proxies and was widely viewed as the theocracy’s second most powerful leader, after Khamenei. After Hamas attacked Israel, on October 7, 2src23, triggering a broad Israeli military campaign in Gaza, Israel killed Hamas leaders and decimated its military capabilities. In Lebanon and parts of Syria, Israel detonated thousands of pagers of Hezbollah officials and bombed the group’s headquarters in southern Beirut, killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In Syria, Israeli strikes killed senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, crippling Iran’s coördination and control. Iran was either unable or unwilling to help Hamas or Hezbollah fend off Israeli attacks. Nor did it help quell a rebel offensive that ousted the Assad dictatorship, in December, 2src24. Iran largely withdrew its forces from Syria, ending more than a decade of Iranian influence over the country.

The Twelve-Day War showcased the U.S. and Israel’s military supremacy, but what was most unsettling to Iran’s proxies was the way in which Israel’s intelligence apparatus had infiltrated Iran, killing top security officials and nuclear scientists who were housed at high-security military complexes. Hezbollah, severely weakened and struggling to rebuild itself, didn’t join the conflict, nor did Iraq’s Shiite militias. The Houthis fired a few missiles at Israel early on and then turned silent; they had just emerged from their own conflict with the U.S., and Israel was in the midst of bombing Yemen and targeting senior Houthi commanders and officials. At the time, several regional experts told me that top security and political figures inside the Iraqi Shiite militias and the Houthis were limiting their use of technology, using burner phones and spending minimal time online to prevent Israel from tracking them.

This time around, Hezbollah got involved because “they feel that Iran is facing an existential war, and what happens to Iran is going to happen to them, so in a way they are intertwined in Hezbollah’s future,” Randa Slim, a program lead for the Middle East at the Stimson Center, told me. “Ideologically, they are bound to intervene once asked, and religiously they have a duty to intervene once the Supreme Leader is killed.” Khamenei was both Hezbollah’s political ally and its paramount spiritual guide; the group followed his religious rulings and used his authority to legitimize violent acts. And yet Hezbollah’s choice to plunge the country into war has fractured the group, which is now facing backlash from its own supporters, and from the Lebanese government. In Iraq, too, Iran’s allied militias are fragmented. Smaller ones have joined the war for ideological reasons and to avenge Khamenei’s death. But the Badr Organization, one of the largest Shiite militias and Iran’s oldest proxy in Iraq, has yet to get involved. Its leaders are part of the Iraqi government, and have access to lucrative oil contracts that are worth millions of dollars more now that oil prices have spiked, Mansour, the senior fellow at Chatham House, told me. “All these groups, including the Houthis, they’re all in survival mode,” he went on, “and they’re all just, from their perspectives, pragmatically trying to understand what the best decisions would be.”

The Houthis, at least at the moment, have more to gain from staying out of the war. As the Axis of Resistance has weakened, they’ve grown in stature. When the war in Gaza erupted, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians, and imposed their chokehold on Red Sea shipping lanes. Last May, in a ceasefire deal following nearly two months of U.S. aerial assaults, the Houthis agreed to stop targeting American ships—but not Israeli ones. President Trump claimed victory, whereas the Houthis declared it was the U.S. that had backed down, strengthening their resistance credentials.

Despite their bravado, the Houthis have suffered significant losses during their conflict with Israel. In late August, Israel struck Sanaa, killing senior Houthi figures, including the group’s Prime Minister and several other ministers. In October, the group announced that its military chief of staff, Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari, a popular figure in the country, had also been killed in the strikes. Large crowds turned out for his state funeral, and he still appears on billboards in the Yemeni capital, a constant reminder of how much the Houthis have lost. Their recent buildup of defenses is likely less about getting ready to support Iran and more about preventing Israel and the U.S. from killing their supreme leader. After Khamenei and Nasrallah, “Abdul Malik al-Houthi is the long-lasting leader that is still standing from that generation,” Basha said.

The Houthis are also facing significant domestic challenges. Yemen’s economy is in tatters, and the country is facing a dire humanitarian crisis. There are cash shortages, and the salaries for civil servants haven’t been paid out, even for many Houthi fighters. During this holy fasting month of Ramadan, many Yemenis can hardly afford basic items, sparking widespread anger at the Houthi authorities, who are also under pressure from U.S. and European sanctions. Politically, too, there are concerns. Saudi Arabia is seeking to unify anti-Houthi forces in southern Yemen following the recent military withdrawal of the United Arab Emirates and the implosion of a key but divisive militia it backed. The Houthis are also seeking billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to pay salaries and other government expenses as part of a stalled political agreement. They could threaten to attack in order to extract concessions from the kingdom, but targeting Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iran could prove unwise. The Houthis are concerned about the day after, Nagi, of the International Crisis Group, said. Even if they don’t join the war, they could become targets of the U.S. and Israel later, or face harsher sanctions should Iran become significantly weakened or were the regime to collapse. “They have tough options, and each option is worse than the other,” Nagi said.

Unlike Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias, the Houthis are not politically beholden to Iran. And, unlike many Shiites around the world, they didn’t view Khamenei as their supreme religious authority; that role is filled by Abdul Malik al-Houthi and his ancestors. (The Houthis believe in Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam that emerged in the eighth century, whose followers are almost exclusively found in Yemen.) Iran may have positioned the Houthis as a regional player that can exert pressure on Iran’s neighbors, but the Houthis have always put their own interests first. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but it’s transactional in its nature,” Slim told me.