This two-part essay has been sitting in my drafts for a couple of months, postponed for what felt like a lack of timing. Today, I finalized it after hearing the devastating news that Marjane Satrapi is no longer with us.

This is not an obituary, but it’s about why her work was still being attacked the months before she died, and what that tells us.

Donna Haraway, an American scholar of science and technology, once argued that the disorder of our era is unnecessary. It exists, yes, but it is not a structural necessity of our existence. She was speaking about a multi-species problem, but her claim extends well beyond ecology.

People lay bare their private traumas in public, no matter how excruciating, to ring an alarm, while nature rings its own in a different tongue. But when these traumas are denied, questioned, or ridiculed, that denial changes nothing, because the harm is already in motion, and what it leaves behind outlasts every dismissal. What follows is a chronology of bad listening, not the failure to hear these alarms, but the refusal to: receiving a testimony and deciding before it is finished that it does not count.

Marjane Satrapi was one of those rare people who opened her life to ring that exact alarm. Persepolis, her four-volume comic masterpiece about life before, under, and far from Iran’s Islamic regime, was adapted into a film in 2007 and won the Jury Prize at Cannes. That was a long time ago. Things, it seems, have changed.

But recently, on March 5, 2026, France 4 announced it would air Persepolis. Over the weekend, the film came under a coordinated attack on X. The critics claimed it was “Islamophobic,” that it “dehumanized veiled women,” and that screening it while Iran was under bombardment served as Western war propaganda.

The timing made the subject raw, but the moment carried a sickening sense of déjà vu. The objection folded neatly into a much older grievance: that the film tells the revolution from the view of a pro-Shah bourgeoisie. It is an odd charge to level against an author whose family were literal communists, whose uncle was jailed by the Shah and then executed by the very regime the revolution installed. The accusation of privileged birth has become its own secular auto-da-fé.

This controversy gives any serious observer a much more violent flashback to 2011. That was when this exact film was used to campaign against, and eventually attack, the Tunisian Nessma Channel and the home of its owner. Nessma had screened a Tunisian Arabic version of it. The justification for this violence by emerging radical Islamist groups was “depicting God,” an unusual, imported theological argument to make in Tunisia. At the time, that small North African country was the pioneer of free expression, riding the high of a revolution that had promised a higher ceiling for liberty. Many were sophisticated enough to realize this was never about “envisaging a deity,” yet the broader institutional reactions did nothing to stop the slide. The events escalated until the owner of Nessma apologized, and a case was filed against the channel for insulting “the divine entity”. By the time the verdict neared, Salafists gathered outside the court demanding his execution under the black banners of the caliphate. All over a film. He was convicted on May 3, 2012, ironically, World Press Freedom Day.

Let us be clear, while critics contest that this francophone work contains certain historical inaccuracies, Satrapi was not a historian. She never claimed to be. She used her story as a lived experience. What actual Iranians dispute is not whether her story happened, but whether hers is the whole story.

Yet, while these Westernized critics argue about the Iran she drew decades ago, the Iran of the present keeps making her case for her. Since the war began on February 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic claims it has arrested more than 6,500 “traitors and spies”. By its own account, only 567 of them are tied to any organized opposition group.

These are the regime’s words, not mine.

A figure that size is mathematically absurd for a spy network. This leaves two choices: either thousands of ordinary Iranians have reason enough to side with absolutely anyone against the state, or they are not spies at all, but people who protested. Six thousand five hundred people, counted one by one, is a small town taken into custody. The number is official. Yet, the voices that endlessly question whether Satrapi’s story was “the whole story” have said absolutely nothing about it. The doubt reserved for the witness never reaches the people filling the cells.

From outside Iran, a particular question gets asked: Why does this keep happening there?

The question sounds innocent, but a lazy assumption sits inside it: that this is simply how Iran is. It assumes the place and its rulers are one organic organism, that the suffering is native to the soil and not actively inflicted by men with guns. It treats autocracy as the natural lay of the land, so there is nothing to examine and nothing to be done.

Satrapi saw the contradictions facing the Islamic Republic, and diagnosed this exact logic from inside France. In January 2025, she refused the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest honor, rather than accept it from a state whose stance toward Iran she had come to see as hypocritical, one that spoke of solidarity with Iranian women while turning away their dissidents and artists at the visa counter. She called out that hypocrisy plainly. This passivity is not indifference; it is a structural belief that Iranians chose what rules them and are simply living inside their own cultural choice.

Many completely miss the point of why people open their personal history to the public. A compromise like this is enormously sacrificial. It is a piece of one’s own life given up, and the reason for giving it up is to force a realization: that our contemporary, ossified “oppressed-oppressor” dichotomies are broken. The world should have been intelligent enough to examine this a long time ago.

After Persepolis, Satrapi seemed desperate to write about anything else. Broderies (2003) sat her down for teatime with the grandmother who would die while she was abroad. Poulet aux prunes (2004) followed a tar player in Iran. She made Radioactive (2019), a film about Marie Curie, and Paradis Paris (2024), set far from her homeland. Even Femme, Vie, Liberté (2022), built from other people’s accounts of the Mahsa Amini uprising, was still Iran. She kept reaching for other subjects, and her country kept calling her back.

Those who bear witness and share what they lived, even with all the evidence, even through art and literature, even at the cost of prison or death, are systematically filed away as collateral damage in a “misunderstood” Middle Eastern country. Their suffering is explained away as the result of Western demonization. Meanwhile, the regime, which built its entire narrative before and after taking power on a cult of victimhood and marginalization, attracts none of that intellectual scrutiny.

For a certain strain of the postcolonial and anti-imperialist mind, the only oppressor permitted on the table is the West. The others are never named, because so little is expected of them. The ordinary standards for judging tyranny do not apply to an authoritarianism that wraps itself in the language of “authenticity” and “resistance.” We are asked to treat these regimes as minors, to excuse them, to hold them to no account, and to look away from the monstrous results of a nurturing that has run, by now, for almost half a century. The present reality refutes the very framework that hardened these conditions.

This inability to listen to these stories, and the active unwillingness to do so, did not begin in the 2000s. It comes from a long, painful history, and not only a Persian one, but an Arab one too. For decades, local writers tried to sound the alarm about what it would cost to romanticize Islamist movements while those movements promised, and then predictably delivered, authoritarianism.

When the communities cried out, they were silenced by Western apologists and local enforcers alike. When minorities objected, they were told they disrespected the will of the majority. When the majorities objected, they were told they were insensitive to minorities. The ideological alarm points every way at once: today it is us, tomorrow it will be others.

What persists, unnamed and unchallenged, is a state that imprisons and executes its own people while presenting itself to the world as the ultimate wronged party. Alongside it is a wider audience that looks on and decides this is simply the natural condition of that part of the world.

Both endure precisely because people are unwilling to name them for what they are. They remain radioactive in the truest sense. The harm they cause keeps emitting long after the events that produced it, and nothing within their reach can heal while they continue to do so.

This is what it meant for Satrapi to carry her own history. She did not remember the past so much as remain irradiated by it. Like uranium, it did not fade with distance or time; it kept emitting, kept damaging, long after she had left the country that produced it. The horrors and violations she lived through were never sealed off in some finished chapter. They stayed alive, decaying and radiating in the present tense, because the conditions that caused them never ended. She was affected by her past for the simplest and cruelest of reasons: it was never actually past. It went on happening, to other people, in the cells and the streets, every day she lived. To remember it was to be exposed to it again.

The fault was never Satrapi’s. It lay in conditions that were never necessary but only left unexamined. Had those conditions not existed, her story would never have drawn a single attack, because she would never have had a reason to tell it in the first place. She told it anyway, and that was a burden she was never free to choose.

To Marjane Satrapi, whose past was radioactive, and whose world never gave her the closure she deserved.

He was always measured against the man he replaced, and the measurement never flattered him. Ali Abdullah Saleh governed Yemen for thirty-three years by dancing, in his own phrase, on the heads of snakes, a politician to his marrow who kept everyone around him on edge because no one could be certain which way he would turn next. Hadi could not dance that way, and neither could anyone else, but it was Hadi the comparison shadowed from the day it began.

The Compromise Candidate

Hadi was the compromise of a very turbulent transition in 2012 following the Arab Spring, the consensus candidate, the lone name on a single-candidate ballot, a vice president raised up precisely because he threatened no one and stood for nothing in particular. Yemen’s transition wanted a figure neutral enough to be acceptable to every side, which in practice meant a figure too slight to become anyone’s champion, and the assumption folded into his selection was that he would be easy to manage. He was a southerner with no northern base, a soldier with no political machine, a deputy who had spent eighteen years at Saleh’s side without once becoming a rival worth purging.

The phrase that came to define Hadi’s career was a parting gift from his predecessor. In a public address to his loyalists, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that “Hadi had an immunity against understanding.” It was a calculated strike, meant to dismantle the authority of the man he had once chosen as his deputy. The character assassination neutralized him politically.

Saleh’s personal barbs against Hadi traveled far, but they were self-serving. Hadi had been instrumental in securing Saleh’s victory in the 1994 civil war, and he had a sharp grasp of the regional map when he chose to engage with it. By the time the Houthis seized Sana’a in late September 2014, he had already anticipated the geopolitical fallout of their advance, identifying the chokepoint vulnerabilities of a Houthi-held Bab al-Mandab before anyone outside Yemen was willing to think them through. It was a precise diagnosis of what was coming.

Hadi had come up through the southern army and fought on the losing side of the 1986 war in the South, the faction loyal to Ali Nasir Muhammad in a short and vicious power struggle that tore through the southern leadership, left thousands dead, and sent the losers fleeing north. Hadi was among them, crossing into a northern state that was then still a separate country. When the two Yemens united in 1990 and the South tried to break away again four years later, Hadi sided with Ali Abdullah Saleh against his own region. Saleh made him the defense minister during the fighting and vice president once the secession was crushed. A man of their own at the top of the Yemeni state might have crystallized something for them, but instead they read him as a southerner who had borrowed the logic of the North and spent his life trying to fit into it. He never quite fit in the North either.

A Presidency Without a State

Hadi took office in February 2012 with regional and Western backing, tasked with managing a transition framework that fused revolutionary ambition with Western design. The expectation was that he would quietly follow the script he had been handed, but he surprised the people who had placed him there. He moved on the command structure, reshuffled senior officers, and installed his own men to build a small circle of loyalists around himself. Yet this internal restructuring held no broader state project beneath it. The loyalists were kept close to the capital to keep his circle within reach, leaving the rest of the country exposed while the National Dialogue Conference launched in 2013.

Operating under Western donor support, this consultative architecture was meant to produce a blueprint for a modern state, but the project vanished almost the moment the ink dried on the final documents. The diplomatic process had insulated itself from physical reality that was affecting Yemenis outside of the conference rooms. During the dialogue itself, the Houthis had already laid siege to Dammaj in the north, and by the summer of 2014 they took Amran and killed the army commander defending it, signaling the start of their march south toward Sana’a. Yet Hadi did nothing, choosing to let the peacebuilding script run its course while a militant group systematically dismantled the state.

Meanwhile, the south of Yemen represented a different challenge that Hadi never truly acknowledged. Since unification, the South had lived inside a state that excluded it politically, neglected it economically, and treated it as territory to be administered. Hadi did not address any of it. The southern political response to him was split throughout his presidency. He had a constituency in his native Abyan, and opponents who read him as a southerner who had borrowed the logic of the North. When the Houthis took Sanaa in early 2015 and Hadi made his way to Aden, the South received him. When he fled to Riyadh weeks later, the reception ended. The Southern Transitional Council took its current shape soon after.

The War With the Houthis

Against the Houthis, he had nothing close to their public presence, and the gap between him and Abdulmalik al-Houthi was the cruelest thing about the war. Al-Houthi was young and certain and ideologically armed, a figure who speaks to his public nearly every day, issues sermons, and hands his followers a story about themselves and their place in the world. Hadi could not match that performance, but he understood the raw geography of the conflict. In late September 2014, four days after the Houthis took Sanaa, he warned that whoever held the keys to Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz would not need a nuclear bomb. The international community heard a Saudi puppet making the case for an intervention his patrons wanted, treated his words accordingly, missing the strategic argument he was actually making. There is an irony in this that Yemenis grasped long before outsiders did. Abdulmalik al-Houthi is bound to Iran more deeply and more openly than Hadi was ever bound to Saudi Arabia.

Hadi and the Saudis needed each other. When the Houthis took Sanaa in 2014, Yemen had no unified army to push back. Saleh had spent his last months allied with the Houthis he had once fought, and the alliance had hollowed out the institutions Hadi inherited. He requested the Saudi intervention because nothing else could resist the takeover. The Saudis hoped a legitimate partner could help them contain the Houthi advance and Iran’s interest in Bab al-Mandab, even if that partner was weak and had no presence on the ground. So Riyadh kept him in place. The war they were waging depended on his legitimacy more than on the man who carried it. Title intact, country gone.

Whatever clarity he had in 2014, by the late years of his exile he was a different figure. The Saudis who hosted him grew used to watching him fall asleep in meetings, an old man who flew to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio on a Saudi plane often and was not capable of returning to Yemen. Yemenis watched this and lost patience.

Western analysts and Western think tanks settled into a register of contempt toward Hadi that no comparable figure on the other side of the war ever received. He was dismissed as a “puppet,” a “clerk,” or a “statue,” while the same analyst class spent its energy elsewhere on careful sociological argument about whether the Houthis are really an Iranian proxy, parsing their ideology with patience, and treating Abdulmalik al-Houthi as a political figure worth taking seriously.

His own talent, however limited, never served the country well. He had studied in the Soviet Union and come away fluent in Russian, the kind of preparation that should have meant something in a war where Moscow returned to the region as a quiet protector of the network tearing his country apart. But none of that served Yemen when Russia abstained on Security Council Resolution 2216, refusing to back the arms embargo on the Houthis, and within a year was receiving Houthi delegations in Moscow while Hadi remained in Riyadh.

When he signed his powers over to the Presidential Leadership Council in April of 2022, the office had already been emptied to pure form. The presidency was pulled out from under him and handed to a chairman, Rashad al-Alimi, who had spent the previous eight years as one of his own advisers, a man from inside his own government who now took the chair from him.

Yemen’s Real Loss

Set him beside Abdulmalik al-Houthi, and the contrast does the arguing for you. For all his faults and for all the grievances people had with him, Hadi never committed the mass atrocities currently being inflicted on Yemenis. He did not recruit children to fight his wars. He did not fire missiles into cities that had nothing to do with his war. Hadi did not jail journalists by the dozens, did not disappear dissidents into secret prisons, did not pull boys out of classrooms and return them in coffins, and he certainly did not build a sectarian indoctrination machine that has replaced Yemeni education with religious militancy. He did not turn Palestinian suffering into a recruitment slogan for his own war. Hadi never remade Yemen in Saudi Arabia’s image the way Abdulmalik al-Houthi is remaking it in Iran’s. Is the bar low? No, not really. What the Houthis are building is the most coercive and ideologically aggressive non-state political order Yemen has seen, with a depth of institutional capture that deepens as they consolidate.

The international diplomatic community, however, is structurally unequipped to grapple with an ideological order like that. Foreign capitals and multilateral institutions operate on the assumption that political problems are solved by squeezing and reforming recognized states, a habit that automatically directs their leverage toward the entity that responds to their paperwork. In my years tracking this conflict, I have noticed that proximity shapes what gets analyzed about the country. Western observers have access to the recognized government, but not to the movement that took half the country from it. As a result, the analytical pressure has fallen overwhelmingly on the state, and Yemen has been read through that asymmetry ever since. Today, Rashad al-Alimi sits in the same chair under the same pressure, while the country drifts toward terms its representatives never negotiated.

If there is a wake-up call in Hadi’s death, it is not about the man. It is the realization that Yemen has lacked steady leadership since the Iranian project took root on its soil. Saleh, the shrewdest political operator the country produced in half a century, the man who outmaneuvered every rival for thirty-three years, ended his life inside an alliance with the Houthis, and they killed him for it. If Saleh could not face the Iranian project and survive, then measuring Hadi by his personal flaws completely misses the point. The issue wasn’t the man’s shortcomings; it was that the Yemeni state was no longer equipped to defend itself. Hadi did not create Yemen’s collapse; he just managed its early stages. The political establishment he left behind is now finishing the job, codifying its own liquidation, paragraph by paragraph in the UN.

Week in Brief

Abdul-Malik al-Houthi delivered a daily religious lecture series that set the political vocabulary for the rest of the Houthi-aligned media field, building doctrinal infrastructure for an internal-security campaign and a sharpening of the case against Saudi religious authority during Hajj. Mahdi al-Mashat, chair of the Supreme Political Council, used Unity Day to address governments in the region directly, warning that “if neutrality today is treason, providing facilities to the enemy is the greatest treason,” renewing full solidarity with Iran’s right to manage the Strait of Hormuz, naming “American-Saudi aggression,” and denouncing the “Somaliland” normalisation with Israel as a danger to Yemen and the region.

Read more

Houthi media also published extensively what amounts to an open inventory of Hezbollah drone tactics this week, emphasizing that $400 drones are disabling Israeli tanks to show that non-state groups can impose this level of cost on Israel at this price point. The same week, a Yemeni fighter captured in Ukraine told an interviewer he was promised civilian work, deceived, and pushed to the front by Russian handlers. Although the story was extensively reported across international and Yemeni opposition media, Houthi outlets remained silent on it, choosing instead to dedicate editorial energy to the dispute about a woman who calls herself Mira Saddam Hussein.

Week in Brief

The Iran-U.S. confrontation aftermath set the international agenda before Houthi domestic coverage took over. Iran was presented simultaneously as diplomatically aggrieved (a Hague filing seeking condemnation and compensation), militarily intact (NYT-sourced assessments that Iran recovered most of its missile facilities), and anchoring a post-American order (Qalibaf describing a “new global order” and being appointed Iran’s special representative for Chinese affairs). At the BRICS summit, Araghchi said delegations acknowledged the failure of the war’s goals against Iran and publicly named the UAE as having been targeted for hosting U.S. positions. General Jafari listed preconditions for negotiation that amounted to full-capitulation terms: an end to the war on all fronts, sanctions relief, compensation, and recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Quran-burning mobilization then absorbed the domestic coverage for the rest of the week. What made it analytically distinct from routine Houthi protest cycles was the institutional depth. The Shura Council, the Ministry of Endowments, the Scholars Association, and the Houthi Political Bureau all published separate condemnations on the same day as al-Houthi’s statement. Governorate rallies spread across the north under a shared slogan linking the Quran, Al-Aqsa, Lebanon, and readiness. A Monday march at Al-Sabeen Square, called a “million-person march” for expected high attendance, was announced in al-Houthi’s name. And then the civil-service circular, the ministry-level protests, and the police-graduation framing layered institutional alignment onto the street mobilization.

Abdul-Malik al-Houthi has not appeared on video since his April 21 Sarkha anniversary speech, a 28-day gap, and has recently been substituting written statements for video appearances, which is unusual for him. The Mufti received increased coverage. Deputy foreign minister Hussein Abu-Ras met the Russian ambassador, met the acting UN Resident Coordinator, and told Hezbollah’s international relations official that Hezbollah’s weapons are “an element of strength that should be preserved.” Abu-Ras worked the diplomatic-operational side while al-Houthi worked the theological one.

Deep Dive

Read more

Yesterday, Thursday, May 14, the office of the UN Special Envoy for Yemen announced the first phase of an all-for-all prisoner exchange between the Yemeni government and the Houthis. The Houthi media is treating it as an accomplishment that everyone is saluting each other for. Senior figures are congratulating each other. Mohammed Abdulsalam (chief mediator, US-designated terrorist) announced that the exchange is part of the Stockholm Agreement. Why? Because the regime can continue rounding up people from the streets whenever it wants and calling them spies, the way it did today by abducting a journalist. It's absurd. Meanwhile, Sultan al-Samei, one of the troublemakers inside the Houthi movement and a vocal one, is becoming marginalized after days of signals that he is being pushed away.

Finally, and this is so trivial it is not worth mentioning, but here we are… the problem of the woman claiming to be the daughter of Saddam Hussein is still ongoing, so Nasraddin Amer, the Houthi information chief, had to make a statement about it. We won't mention this in our weekly briefing, because honestly, we shouldn't. But this is just for anyone who wants to be in the know.

Something worth pausing on that surfaced today: the Houthi deputy minister of foreign affairs, Abu-Ras, held discussions with the Russian ambassador, the same day a picture surfaced on social media of Maeen Abdulmalik, former prime minister of the UN-backed government, now a consultant for the presidency office. Russia seems to be casting a wide net at the moment.

The Houthis are also covering the BRICS summit, and the coverage rotates around the countries they keep returning to: Iran, India, the UAE, Russia, and China. The way they read BRICS is not as an economic bloc but as the formation of a counter-order, in which Arab-Islamic culture must be defended against Western hegemony as a matter of civilizational survival. Western dominance is not just political or military for them; it is cultural, and BRICS is read as the architecture through which that dominance gets pushed back.

The Houthis are also increasingly focused on AI, but it is worth understanding how, because they are not interested in AI for advancement. They are interested in it as an information warfare tool. In Houthi media today, one op-ed made the case that AI is a weapon deployed by 'the arrogant ones' against the Umma, designed to sever people from their faith identity and turn them into societies hostage to the enemy's digital assessments. Building sovereign Islamic technical systems, the piece argues, is 'a sacred jihad' equivalent to military confrontation, possibly more important. Saudi Arabia and the UAE get named as Washington's regional tools in the digital domain. Read closely, the argument is not really about AI. It is about splitting from the open internet, building something closer to the Iranian model of a sovereign national network, justified in fully theological language. A Chinese firewall in theological language.

The coverage of Saudi Arabia is oscillating between mentioning it as a war criminal and as a good-faith state, and the country is facing a huge all-direction campaign that seems inevitable. After the Tanuma pilgrims massacre, which took place during the Hajj season in 1923, was set as the historic account for grievances, the daily records they keep for KSA continue. Today's news uses the video archives to produce a twenty-seven-minute documentary about the Dahyan school bus incident in Saada from August 2018, when a Saudi-led coalition airstrike killed over forty children on a summer field trip. The bus is being heavily amplified across Houthi media, alongside other raids that killed civilians, displayed daily. Saudi injury is being kept present-tense. The point is not to remember, it is to refuse to forget.

Yet, there are some softer op-eds and articles on Sep26 and al-Masira that are trying to flirt slightly with the Saudis' 'good faith,' even as they credit the prisoner exchange to pressure on Saudi Arabia. From our observations, that pressure means the condensed media campaign of the past two weeks, with every card they had played across media and social media. Clergy on al-Thawra are attacking both the Saudi government and the UN-backed Yemeni government for the agreements previously signed.

Houthi media is also covering Araghchi’s remarks on the war on Iran. Iran’s foreign minister accused the UAE of participating in the war against Iran, then closed by saying BRICS remains strong and cohesive regardless. Both halves are published together. BRICS has been moving toward a security architecture since the Kazan summit in 2024, with security cooperation named as one of the bloc’s three pillars. One BRICS member publicly accusing another of fighting against; it is the architecture failing in real time.

As Trump leaves China today, Houthi media is framing him as the weaker figure in the room. The version of the summit that gets published is Xi's. Xi says Beijing and Washington agreed to keep trade ties stable, and no parallel Trump statement runs alongside it. Houthi media on the same day also argues that the US is moving away from the MQ-9 drone program after losses over Yemen and Iran, citing Breaking Defense. The Houthi outlet adds its own number on top: nearly 200 drones shot down over Iran and Yemen. They are faithfully committed to this framing, and Axis Weekly has been covering it extensively.

Iran is covered mainly through statements from its leaders, and mainly about Trump's threats, which they say will never affect them or their military creed. The Houthi media is adding its own framing on top, emphasizing the Islamic identity of the Iranian people. The point is to generate sympathy on religious grounds: Iran is Muslim, Trump is an infidel, and the audience in the region should know which side it is on!

The other items in Houthi media today fall within the same integrated field. Today is the seventy-eighth anniversary of the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians from their land in 1948 that remains the foundational grievance of Arab and Muslim political memory. Houthi media is commemorating it, with Hezbollah linked to the idea of resistance and the chronology presented as evidence that Israelis only respond to strength. Amplified across the day, the anniversary becomes the pretext for a larger argument: that investing in weapons and recruitment is a moral right, even a moral obligation, for the nations of the so-called Axis of Resistance.

More to be found in next week’s briefing. Stay tuned!

Domestically, Houthi mobilization continued, albeit on a smaller scale than earlier this quarter. The Houthis’ peculiar campaign against Saudi Arabia, which surfaced last week through the Tanuma file, continued through the commemoration itself and through the May 8 commemoration of the 2015 strikes on the al-Hadi and Hussein al-Houthi shrines. A ground-readiness layer continued underneath, working through summer-course graduates, tribal armed gatherings, and combat drills using the phrase “the coming round.”

Week in Brief

Houthi outlets returned to one argument across the week. The May 6 ceasefire was the moment American projection of force in the region collapsed. Hormuz is the next chapter of the same story. The Houthis are the originating end of an arc that has now reached Iran

Read more

The Houthi political project this week converged on Saudi Arabia. Three campaigns converged in parallel: a Tanuma-1923 grievance that saturated Houthi media, a celebration of Iranian strikes on the UAE, and a spy-network operation that converted announced confessions into a domestic state-building campaign. Hormuz dominated international headlines.

Read more

Two months earlier, the operation had been launched allegedly to restore freedom of navigation. The president called the Houthis “sinister mobsters and thugs” who were “hated by the Yemeni people”. For a moment, that gave Yemenis hope that Washington might finally care about who actually lives under them. The hope did not survive contact with the campaign. A superpower had failed to defeat the Houthis. The Signal leak had exposed the administration as confused about its own war plan. And the people on the ground who were resisting the Houthis drew the obvious conclusion: if the United States could not turn this tide, no one could. The Houthis came out cemented.

But for anyone paying attention, the United States never enters these conflicts to fix them. There is always a limited objective, a limited authority, a limited timeframe, and a limited interest in strategic outcomes. The May 6 ceasefire was that pattern made literal. By the time the mission ended, the only commitment that survived was that U.S.-flagged vessels would not be struck. The mission had narrowed from the freedom of the seas to the protection of the same American hulls that had been deployed to confront the Houthis. I argued at the time that the May 6 ceasefire handed the Houthis a rare and unearned diplomatic win. In a sense, it was the original sin of this administration’s Iran policy. The same narrowing is now happening at the Strait of Hormuz, and the question is whether Washington has learned anything in the year between.

The United States has a long history of limited intervention, and the Red Sea, unfortunately, is not unique. In 1983, the Reagan administration sent Marines into Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force but after 241 Americans were killed in the barracks bombing that October, the mission narrowed from peacekeeping to force protection, and within months had narrowed further to extraction. In 2011, the Obama administration helped launch a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians; but once Gaddafi fell, NATO walked away from a country that has not had a stable government since. The pattern held across administrations and is quite familiar for outside observers. American interventions are designed to be exited, and the exit is where the original objective gets traded for something less embarrassing to abandon.

On paper, the May 2025 ceasefire restored freedom of navigation, but in practice, it covered American hulls and left every other flag to its own luck and arrangements with the Iran-backed Houthis. The distinction was tested almost immediately. When the Houthis sank the Magic Seas and the Eternity C in July 2025, neither vessel flew an American flag, and the administration offered no public protest. The signal landed in Sanaa.

The signal also landed in the boardrooms. In December 2025, Maersk resumed Red Sea transits for the first time in two years, citing a “temporary suspension of attacks” by the Houthis. CMA CGM followed in January 2026. The Houthis themselves described the resumption in carefully phrased language about the “conditions they were providing” for the Red Sea corridor. The phrasing was awkward enough to be revealing. Whether through quiet contact, third-party signaling, or accurate reading of the moment, the largest Western shippers had returned to the Red Sea contingent on Houthi forbearance. And the Houthis were openly characterizing that forbearance as something they had granted.

By 2026, the Houthis were stopping Red Sea traffic and deciding who could pass. Behnam Ben Taleblu and I argued at the Atlantic Council that Iran’s proxies do not require battlefield victories. They require diplomatic patience from their adversaries, and time to use it. The May 6 ceasefire provided both.

After the Ceasefire

The whole American intervention in the Red Sea was a circular exercise without a strategy. The Houthis had not been seriously targeting American assets before the carriers arrived, but they were already a significant regional threat, and a sustained campaign could have meaningfully degraded them. The Houthis did take real damage in those two months. Personnel, infrastructure, weapons stockpiles. But the campaign was not designed to translate that into anything strategic, rather it was designed to be limited, and exited. And exit it the United States did, walking away from a mission it apparently came to see as someone else’s job, or Europe’s, or anybody’s. Washington came out of the operation in roughly the same strategic position as before, with one new addition: a ceasefire that legitimized the Houthis’ assertion that they had not lost.

The day after the truce, Trump went to the cameras and praised the Houthis. They “had a great capacity to withstand punishment.” They had “taken tremendous punishment.” And “you could say there’s a lot of bravery there.” A great deal could be said about that assessment, but what came through most clearly was that Trump had been surprised. Surprised that a movement that had spent nearly a decade fighting Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the internationally recognized Yemeni government in an asymmetrical war, that had absorbed weapons and missile know-how from the IRGC’s ballistic program, that had ridden out the Biden administration’s strikes, and that had been firing at Israel for two years, did not, in fact, simply roll over after sixty intermittent days of American bombing.

By the end of it, Trump told reporters that the Houthis had capitulated. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi denied it on television and kept attacking Trump by name. Admitting the truth would have undermined him with his own followers. The Houthi project is built on the religious claim of leading a war against America and Israel. Capitulation is theologically impossible for them. The press ran with the denial. From firsthand sources, the capitulation was real. But amid the backlash against Washington’s handling of the war, the Houthis’ version of events became the accepted public account. By February 2026, with Israeli operations against Iran underway, the working assumption on every policy panel was that the Houthis would re-enter the Red Sea. Few people stopped to ask whether they were still capable of it.

But the Houthis were in a weaker position by early 2026 than the commentary suggested. Israeli strikes on Hodeidah and Ras Isa, plus tightening sanctions, had done more sustained damage across the year than two months of American bombing did. There was an opening. Nobody took it. As I wrote for the Stimson Center, the Southern Transitional Council fell apart in January 2026, its leader left for Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia took over the south. The coalition that should have been ready for this moment no longer existed.

Mirror at Hormuz

The same pattern, on a far larger scale, is now visible at Hormuz. Iran has absorbed extraordinary losses, beginning with the killing of Ali Khamenei on the first day of operations and extending through the deaths of IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, the strikes on Bandar Abbas and Bushehr, and the systematic targeting of military and civilian infrastructure. The Islamic Republic, however, has not adjusted its coercive behavior at the strait in response to those losses. It continues to mine the waterway and to apply selective pressure on transit, and in April, the parliament formalized the latter into a $2 million toll, written into law. The question of whether Iran’s coercion at Hormuz will eventually recede is, in important ways, less consequential than whether Washington has already begun adjusting its objectives downward to accommodate that coercion. The latter question, on present evidence, increasingly answers itself.

The negotiating drafts are perhaps the clearest indicator. The American opening position required the unconditional reopening of the strait. Iran’s counterproposal offered controlled passage coordinated with the IRGC, which is to say with the same institution that had imposed the closure. Between the fifteen-point American plan and the ten-point Iranian response, every operative provision concerning Iran’s enrichment program had been removed. Trump characterized the result as “a workable basis.” What had begun as an effort to prevent a nuclear Iran has, in the space of two negotiating drafts, become an effort to negotiate with Iran for transit through a waterway the intervention itself rendered contingent on Iranian permission. The pattern is the Red Sea pattern, recurring at the scale of a great-power confrontation. Operation Project Freedom, the Navy escort mission designed to enforce passage by military means, lasted forty-eight hours before being suspended in favor of talks.

That the Islamic Republic has continued to function through this scale of decapitation is not without precedent. The Houthi precedent. Between August and October 2025, Israeli strikes killed Houthi Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi, roughly a dozen cabinet members, and Chief of Staff Mohammed al-Ghamari. The system did not collapse. As I wrote at the time, what gets killed in these operations and what does not are not the same thing. An acting prime minister was named within forty-eight hours. The movement kept firing at Israel, at a slower rate. The IRGC is built on the same architecture: distributed revenue streams, proxy relationships, parallel ministries, ideological infrastructure. All of it designed to absorb the loss of any individual figure, including the most senior one. Mojtaba Khamenei was named Supreme Leader nine days after his father’s death. He has yet to make a public appearance, and rumors of his own death circulate. The regime continues to function regardless.

Tehran is also reading the American political clock. Rising oil prices, growing domestic dissatisfaction with the war, the visible difficulty of sustaining a kinetic phase into a second one. These are inputs Iran can use to conclude that the United States will run out of political will before the Islamic Republic runs out of institutional capacity. These signals are not lost on the axis, which monitors American domestic dysfunction precisely for its strategic value. Losses are absorbed inside that calculation rather than against it. The ideological project on which the regime was built does not require its original architects, in the same way that the Houthi project did not require its original cabinet. The live test of that theory is underway. A month ago, my team and I tracked how the Houthis claimed the April ceasefire between Washington and Tehran as their own victory within hours. Tehran’s behavior at the strait is consistent with the Houthi precedent having been fully absorbed, and the proxies are already rewriting its terms in advance.

And on the anniversary itself, Houthi-controlled outlets framed the May 6 ceasefire as "Yemen's first failure for Trump in his second presidency," run under the hashtag #American_Hegemony_Failure. The same outlets ran columnists describing Project Freedom's collapse as proof that Iran has forced Washington into "negotiation under fire," with American power retreating from the strait within 48 hours of arriving. For the Houthis, the American retreat was their victory and that of the Axis itself, and they continue to remind their opponents of it.

What Washington Is Selling

There were lessons available from the Red Sea. It is unclear the administration weighed any of them. Perhaps the most striking parallel is how the locals were not part of the calculation at all. After the abrupt ceasefire and the speech about Houthi bravery, the movement turned its weapons inward. It silenced dissent, executed people accused of spying for Western intelligence, raided UN offices, and labeled an expanding circle of Yemenis as American or Israeli agents. The paranoia hardened. The grip on the governed population tightened, and the international community, through aid agencies and humanitarian frameworks, was effectively conscripted into legitimizing it.

This is the part that should give pause to the Iranian dissidents currently calling for American military intervention and betting on the regime’s weakness. They have misread the offer. What Washington is selling is risk mitigation, not regime change. The calculation is that a weakened regime that still collects tolls at the strait is preferable to the chaos of a collapsed one. The Red Sea has already shown what such an intervention actually produces: a narrow ceasefire, a victory speech, and a regime more entrenched at home than it was when the bombing started.

The political and ideological system Tehran is betting on was built for this kind of pressure, and designed to keep functioning under it. The truce that briefly substituted for sustained pressure in Yemen was a much smaller agreement than its framing suggested. The same gap between framing and substance is now showing up at Hormuz. The operation has been called a victory. The Strait has been called reopened. The U.S. Navy is back in the Strait, clearing the way for ships. Force does not reach the parts of these systems that matter most. Whether Washington recognizes that this time is the only thing still in question.

Subscribe now

Most people scroll past work like this without a second thought, if they notice it at all, because the assumption is that a militia’s media output is not worth serious attention. Analysts make a more refined version of the same mistake. Most analysis of the so-called axis of resistance treats authoritarian media as output, something to decode or flag or map, but rarely ask what it means when the output is genuinely good, when the artwork is compositionally sharp, and the visual argument lands faster than any analyst rebuttal. When the talent we see is not faked or coerced, and when it is not mediocre. What does that tell us about the system that produced it?

Somewhere in Houthi-controlled Sanaa, a man who has almost certainly never set foot in the United States is drawing Jeffrey Epstein with the kind of moral fixation usually reserved for victim advocates, and Donald Trump with a venom most American cartoonists reserve for their own president. He has positions on ICE, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the multinational corporations American progressives have been boycotting for years, and his moral clarity on all of it is so sharp that an American reader would, on first encounter, mistake him for someone whose politics they share. And he has never, not once, turned that talent on the movement he serves.

Kamal Sharaf has been doing this from Sanaa for years. His craft is considerable, but what makes his work worth examining is that it functions as an X-ray of how the proxy system processes talent from the inside. The work itself displays a level of global awareness that most observers would not expect from what is so widely reported as a "ragtag militia.”

What makes his cartoons effective is that so many of them tap into grievances that his audience already holds, and the underlying anger is widely shared. But he is selective about what he shares because he represents the Houthis’ logos, their entire framework for how the world should be seen and spoken about. He will draw about Sudan but not about Bucha. He will draw about Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes but not about Yemeni children recruited by Houthi summer camps. The moral clarity is always pointed outward, and the boundaries of that clarity map perfectly onto the geopolitical commitments of the axis of resistance. He is exploiting real grievances, and the effect is to position the movement on the right side of causes that have nothing to do with it, making that positioning feel like a coincidence rather than a strategy.

While this essay is about one cartoonist, in reality, it examines the proxy model and how it works at the cultural level, the conditions that produce the propaganda as opposed to the propaganda itself, and what it means when the artist producing it genuinely believes he is free.

The Dissident Years of Kamal Sharaf

In 2010, four years before the Houthi takeover of Yemeni state institutions and well before the current conflict, the government of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrested Sharaf. At the time, he was a cartoonist at Al-Jumhuriya, the official state newspaper, and a government employee at the Ministry of Electricity, and he ran an anti-corruption campaign called Banbsrkum (we will observe you) on Facebook in his spare time. His brother Omar told NewsYemen that masked armed men in civilian and military clothing stormed their home during iftar, handcuffed Kamal, and took him to an unknown location. Reporters Without Borders and IFEX campaigned for his release. Whatever one thinks of Sharaf's politics, then or now, cartoonists should not be imprisoned for drawing, and that principle does not require qualification. It was true in 2010, and it remains true today, including in the territories the Houthis now control, where no such freedom exists.

In the years between his release and the war, Sharaf did what independent artists do. He continued drawing, and his work from this period shows an artist who was genuinely pluralist in his targets. One of the covers he illustrated, for a Taiz satirical journalist's book called Elm Al-Zarreh, a title that sounds like 'nuclear science' but is actually a pun on the Yemeni slang for being squeezed or ground down, caricatures the three pillars of the old regime under the subtitle 'Religion, Dynamite, and Military.' The back cover is a monologue in which a Yemeni man swears he is not a communist, not a Nasserist, not a Brotherhood member, not a separatist, not a Houthi, not al-Qaeda, not northern, not southern, not with the revolution, not against the revolution, until he gives up entirely and says he is Somali. It is a satire of factionalism itself, the impossibility of being simply Yemeni without a label.

Sharaf also joined a civil society caricature project during the 2013 National Dialogue. He wrote an op-ed in Aden Al-Ghad arguing that real intellectuals try to understand people's problems in order to create change, and to open people's eyes to the truth, while the fake ones are afraid of people understanding, because they would be the first to be exposed.' And in early 2015, as the war was starting, he organized a caricature exhibition in Taiz called 'Our Wrong Paths,' which he said would critique 'the negatives of religious discourse that supports the spread of hatred,' and ran a children's cartooning workshop under the banner 'My Beloved Yemen' where kids drew the flag, the republican eagle, folk costumes, and Yemeni architecture, all in service of what he described as 'rooting the values of belonging, love, tolerance, and pride in this country.' That is the tradition Sharaf was working in before the war.

Sharaf's pre-war work leaned towards pluralism, critiquing the failures of politics and religion in Yemeni society without exempting anyone. But when the war redrew the lines, when the Houthis took full power, his sectarian and family alignments determined which side of the new arrangement he landed on. The anti-establishment instinct survived when the establishment changed, and his ideas about the world became narrower, existing only in the Houthi lane.

After the Houthi takeover in 2014 and the Saudi-led intervention in 2015, Sharaf became active on social media, drawing cartoons about the war and circulating his work through pro-Houthi outlets. By 2019, his cartoons were being featured in most of the Houthis' official channels and other more localized and obscure channels, such as al-Hudhud, Hajjah News, and across Houthi-affiliated feeds on Telegram. By the end of the year, he had adopted the Houthi project wholesale.

His creative identity was never taken from him but rather redirected in a way that served the Houthi project entirely. He still describes his work as truth-telling, still speaks of exposing contradictions and refusing to look away, and because the vocabulary of independence survived intact, the asymmetry is almost impossible to detect from the outside. His critique points in every direction except inward, and neither his audience nor, arguably, he himself seems to notice where the boundaries are drawn.

But it would be naive to treat Sharaf as a captured neutral. The Sharafaddine family is Sayyid, part of the theological aristocracy that sits at the core of the Houthi project's claim to legitimacy through Ahl al-Bayt. His brother Hashim served as Information Minister in the Houthi Government of Change and Reconstruction. He is not an outsider who was absorbed by the movement. He is from its upper echelon, ideologically aligned, theologically invested, fighting for his own.

The Houthis have systematically dismantled traditional tribal authority since taking power, imposing Hashemite supervisors above sheikh structures and treating the tribal system as a competitor to be replaced by Sayyid supremacy. Sharaf, a Sayyid from the Sharafaddine family, was drawing against sheikhdom before the Houthis had the power to dismantle it. That was not dissent. That was the movement's position, articulated in ink before it was enforced by arms

Sharaf rejected the hatred that came from the old regime. Whether he recognizes the hatred that comes from his own is a question the cartoons answer more honestly than any interview he has given. The proxy model is not just absorbing outsiders but activating insiders whose alignments were already compatible. The vocabulary of dissent was not surrendered; it was simply the part the system let him keep because it cost the system nothing.

The Artist in the Axis System

What do the Houthis produce when they have genuine talent at their disposal? I spent the better part of a year tracking Sharaf's output as part of Axis Weekly, our newsletter that monitors how the axis of resistance coordinates its narrative across its media nodes. Sharaf kept appearing in all of them. On SABA daily, on Press TV where he was profiled for international audiences without any mention of his Houthi institutional ties, and in Russian outlets circulating his cartoons to frame Trump.

In January 2025, Sharaf was physically in Tehran. Iran's Art Bureau, the cultural arm of the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization, hosted a tribute to him, culminating in the inauguration of a 120-piece exhibition of his work titled 'Kamal Al-Fann.' In attendance were Iranian graphic designers and caricaturists, Russian artists, the family of an Iranian 'martyr' buried in Yemen, the family of the late Iranian ambassador to Yemen Hasan Irlu, the secretary of the Ammar Popular Film Festival, and a representative of the Yemeni embassy in Tehran. He spoke of feeling like 'a soldier in the battle,' quoted Imam Khomeini calling America 'the Great Satan,' and described caricature as 'a form of jihad.' The head of the Yemeni community in Iran noted that Sharaf had 'received a degree of artistic recognition from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi' himself. A Yemeni cartoonist honored in Iran's capital, in a room with Russian artists, the families of Iranian war dead, and an embassy official pledging collaboration 'in all fields of art,' that is not a freelancer being appreciated, that is an infrastructure celebrating one of its own.

In April 2026, Sharaf drew a cartoon depicting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun's head as a football being kicked by the US and Israel, with a Hezbollah figure as goalkeeper. Within hours, Tasnim, the IRGC-linked news agency, republished it. Lebanese officials and activists erupted, calling it an insult to their president. A diplomat described it as 'a departure from international norms governing relations between friendly states.' Tasnim deleted the cartoon without explanation. The cartoon was drawn in Sanaa and republished by the IRGC's media arm in Tehran, and it was enough to trigger a diplomatic crisis with Beirut. What none of the coverage addressed was the more basic question of how a Houthi cartoonist ended up doing the IRGC's political messaging against a sitting head of state in the first place.

Considering Sharaf's modest platform before the war and his rise across the axis of resistance, his evolution can be read in two ways. It could be a consciously chosen alignment, a man drawn to a movement that promised to restore the very social order his forefathers once presided over, the primacy of the Sayyid class over the tribal and republican structures that had displaced it. Or it could be something he would describe as organic, a natural deepening of convictions he always held. Either reading is possible, and both may be partially true. But what neither reading can account for is the specificity of what disappeared from his work. It is not simply that Sharaf stopped critiquing power. It is that the exact subjects he once drew against, militarization, tribalism, the weaponization of children, are the subjects the Houthis now practice at institutional scale, and his brush went silent on each one precisely as the movement adopted it.

On Russian Telegram, the pro-Kremlin war correspondent Abbas Djuma used Sharaf's cartoons to reinforce Russian foreign policy narratives on Syria, while the channel of New Eastern Outlook, linked to the Russian Academy of Sciences, circulated his work on Trump's Middle East tour. In France, Investig'Action, the Belgian anti-imperialist platform run by Michel Collon, published a full profile describing Sharaf as an artist who 'always places himself on the side of the oppressed,' with no mention of Jehad Magazine, no mention of his brother in the Houthi cabinet, and no mention of the Tehran ceremony where he quoted Khomeini and described caricature as a form of jihad. The profile is a case study in itself as it shows what the infrastructure looks like at the receiving end, where the laundering has already been completed, and the cartoonist arrives as a clean product, stripped of every institutional connection that would complicate the story of a brave dissident speaking truth to power.

Wartime and Peacetime Strategy

During periods of active military confrontation between the United States and Iran or its proxies, whether in Yemen, Lebanon, or Gaza, Sharaf’s cartoons target American power projection directly: warships sinking in the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz sealed shut, missiles reaching their targets, the US military rendered impotent. The visual vocabulary is one of humiliation, designed to signal to a regional audience that the superpower can be defied and to signal to a domestic Yemeni audience that the movement is winning.

However, during periods without active conflict, the same artist pivots to something more subtle and, arguably, more corrosive. The warships disappear and are replaced by the Epstein Files, by ICE raids, by Trump’s pursuit of Greenland, by the internal contradictions of American democracy. The target remains the United States, but the attack surface shifts from military posture to societal fracture. The goal is no longer to demoralize an adversary on the battlefield but to corrode the moral authority of a society by amplifying its existing divisions, and to do so using materials that American audiences themselves have produced and are already arguing about. This is not propaganda in the traditional sense of fabrication. It is something closer to curation, the careful selection and reframing of real American failures for an audience that is primed to receive them.

What this pattern reveals is not just a cartoonist responding to the news but a media apparatus that understands the difference between an adversary’s military posture and its social fabric, and knows how to attack each one with different tools at different moments. The same hand that draws a warship sinking in the Red Sea during a military confrontation draws Jeffrey Epstein during peacetime, and the shift happens with the fluency of someone who has internalized not just the politics of the axis of resistance but the politics of the country he is targeting. That is not talent alone. That is infrastructure thinking through an artist’s hand.

The purpose of using American societal fractures is not to persuade Americans, but to insulate the movement’s followers. By curating the worst of the West, Sharaf provides a constant stream of "evidence" that the Houthi path is the only moral alternative. It turns global news into a local psychological anchor, ensuring that the movement’s stance feels like a defensive necessity rather than a political choice.

Inside the Production Line

Iran found a movement with real grievances, real local roots, and real capability, and offered it a deal: keep your identity, keep your resistance vocabulary, point it where we need it, and we will make you more powerful than you ever were. The Houthis were not coerced. They willingly chose to become that proxy. And the people who pay the cost, the Yemeni public, never got to make that choice. I have made this argument for years, in Foreign Policy, in Axis Weekly, in every piece I have written about the Houthi ’ project since the Red Sea crisis began.

Iran's investment in cultural production across its proxy network is not new. The LEGO-style animation videos produced by Hezbollah and its affiliates have drawn attention in recent years, and analysts have begun to study the axis's visual media capabilities as a subject in their own right. But the focus has been on the flashy and the viral, and the quieter, more sustained forms of cultural production, the daily cartoons, the children's magazines, the serialized comics, have received almost no scrutiny. Sharaf is not the exception within this cultural system. He is the evidence of how deep it runs.

The movement found an artist with real talent, real dissident credentials, and real legitimacy, and offered him the same deal. Keep your craft, keep your truth-teller vocabulary, point it where we need it, and we will make you more celebrated than you have ever been. Before the Houthis, Sharaf was marginal, imprisoned under Saleh, writing disclaimers about not being an intellectual, exhibiting in a Taiz cultural center. After the Houthis, he is honored by Islamic Jihad, profiled in Al Mayadeen, interviewed on Al Alam from Tehran, published daily on SABA, circulated on Tasnim, the most visible artist in the entire resistance axis.

The direction of his critique was the price, and the price was cheap, because the vocabulary stayed the same. In a 2022 interview with Al Mayadeen, he described caricature as “shocking, bold, and often rude and merciless” and called a cartoonist who attacks from personal grudge rather than conviction “nothing more than a thug with an artistic brush.” Then he said: “The most important success I achieved in my life was making my art a weapon against the aggressors. Even war has its positives, it is a stimulating environment for resistance and work, for those who possess faith, conviction, and a cause they believe in.”

What Iran did to the Houthis as a movement, the Houthis did to Sharaf as an artist. The proxy relationship is fractal. It looks the same at every scale. Iran builds proxies that believe they are sovereign. Those proxies absorb talent that believes it is free. And the talent produces content that will shape the next generation of children who will never know there was another option.

In The Captive Mind, his 1953 study of intellectuals who accommodated themselves to Stalinism, Czesław Miłosz reached for a concept from Shi’a Islamic tradition: kitman, the protective concealment of one’s true beliefs under conditions of persecution, developed by minority communities surviving under hostile rule. Miłosz used it to describe writers who maintained an inner sense of freedom while outwardly serving the regime, the dissident self preserved in private while the public self performed compliance. What Sharaf demonstrates is the inversion of kitman. The concealment runs the other way. The outer vocabulary is the vocabulary of dissent, of truth-telling, of the brush as a weapon against power, while the inner alignment is with the system that holds power and the cause it serves. He is not hiding his belief from the regime. He is hiding the regime inside his belief. This is what makes his case more troubling than the Arendtian figure of the bureaucrat who participates in atrocity through thoughtlessness. Sharaf is not thoughtless. He is articulate, ideologically self-aware, and sincere in describing himself as an artist of conscience. The danger is not that he has stopped thinking. It is that the thinking itself has been enlisted, and the vocabulary of independence is now the most efficient instrument of its opposite.

Everything discussed so far operates at the level of narrative and political positioning, cartoons aimed at adults who can contextualize them, agree or disagree, and move on. But on the subject of children, Sharaf did not simply go silent. He switched sides.

He once drew a cartoon against the militarization of Sanaa University and against tribal child soldiers carrying guns. Both were legitimate subjects for satire, both were deeply rooted failures of Yemeni governance, and both are now practiced by the Houthis at a scale that dwarfs anything the old regime produced, and yet neither subject has appeared in his work since the movement he serves became responsible for them.

The Youngest Recipients

Sharaf illustrates Jehad Magazine, a children’s publication issued by the Imam al-Hadi Cultural Foundation, a Houthi sectarian institution headquartered in Sanaa with branches in Saada and Al-Mahwit, and in circulation since at least March 2018. It is a monthly children’s magazine issued in two age brackets: ages four to nine, and ages ten to eighteen. It is distributed free across all Houthi-controlled territories, sold in kiosks, libraries, and the Foundation’s own retail centers. Its thirty-six pages contain stories about Shia-Iranian religious figures, legends glorifying Hezbollah, sectarian content promoting the concept of Wilaya (the local adaptation of Iran’s Velayat-e Faqih doctrine), and narratives that frame armed combat and frontline recruitment as heroic and sacred. The magazine’s Telegram channel describes it as serving ‘the generation of dignity and knowledge.’ Its protagonist is a boy named Jehad.

The magazine’s Telegram channel features a recurring segment called “Friends of Jehad,” displaying photographs and full names of its child readers, some as young as three. They are not fictional characters. They are real children, photographed and submitted by their families, displayed like a fan club for a publication that turns an underwater nature adventure into a naval assault operation in three episodes. The promotional material for the youngest edition, targeting ages four to nine, looks indistinguishable from any children’s magazine sold anywhere in the world. That is not an accident. It is the design. The indoctrination works precisely because the packaging does not look like indoctrination. It looks like childhood.

Sharaf illustrates Jehad Magazine with the same skill he brings to everything else. The compositions are careful, the characters are drawn with warmth, and the visual storytelling is genuinely engaging for the age group it targets. That is what makes it so unsettling, because it is the same craft he once used to teach children about tolerance and national pride in Taiz, except now the children following his illustrations are learning that jihad is a civic duty, that enemy ships must be sunk, and that a boy’s journey from photographing sharks to planning a naval assault is a natural progression.

Sharaf's involvement in the Houthi children's infrastructure extends beyond illustration. In April 2026, he posted a cartoon in coordination with the Information Ministry and the Higher Committee for Summer Courses, promoting the Houthi summer indoctrination camps under the hashtags #علم_وجهاد (knowledge and jihad) and #اليمن (Yemen). The slogan is a direct adaptation of Khamenei's doctrine of 'jihad of knowledge,' which frames education as an instrument for safeguarding the revolutionary project, imported from Iran and localized for Yemen the same way the Houthis adapted Velayat-e Faqih into their own concept of Wilaya.

The cartoon mocks a figure warning a Yemeni father to protect his son from the camps, while the father protectively shields the boy. The figure opposing the camps is deliberately drawn as feminized and Westernized, coding resistance to child indoctrination not just as political disloyalty but as sexual deviance, weaponizing conservative social attitudes to shame parents into compliance. The message is not subtle: anyone who questions the program is an enemy of Yemeni identity, and resistance to the indoctrination of your own child is a form of cultural treason. These summer courses, branded under 'Tufan al-Aqsa,' combine Quran recitation with scouting, sport, and combat preparation, running through centers named after Ismail Haniyeh and housed in military hospitals and university campuses. Sharaf is not just drawing for children. He is drawing against the parents who might try to keep them.

Soft power exists for exactly this purpose, and the purpose is not coercion but conversion, a distinction that matters because coercion forces compliance from people who still hold their own beliefs in private, while conversion replaces those beliefs entirely, so that compliance no longer feels like compliance. Authoritarian systems built on force are brittle because the moment the force lifts, the loyalty goes with it. Systems built on conversion are durable because the loyalty is internal, indistinguishable from the person’s own sense of self. And the most effective conversion is the one that starts in childhood, before the child has the vocabulary to recognize it as conversion at all. By the time these children are adults, the worldview will not feel like ideology. It will feel like memory.

If Sharaf's case demonstrates anything, it is that the cultural infrastructure of the axis of resistance is not a sideshow to the military one but a parallel system with its own production lines, distribution networks, and long-term objectives. And yet, while the military infrastructure has been met with designations, interdictions, and sanctions, the cultural infrastructure remains almost entirely unaddressed.

The European Union has sanctioned Russian media figures for their role in information warfare, recognizing that propaganda is not a passive act but an instrument of state power with measurable consequences. Kamal Sharaf operates within an identical framework, producing content that circulates across the same geopolitical alliance, and illustrating a children's magazine that functions as a recruitment pipeline for a designated terrorist organization. If the standard for sanctioning propagandists is their role in sustaining an authoritarian system's capacity to project power and reproduce itself, then the question of why figures like Sharaf remain outside that framework deserves an answer.

The most dangerous participants in an authoritarian system are rarely the ones who act out of cruelty. They are the ones who act out of professional competence, out of routine, out of the simple belief that they are doing their job well, what Hannah Arendt would have recognized as the banality of evil, the moment where professional competence becomes indistinguishable from complicity, not because the participant is cruel but because he is good at his job. Sharaf is not a torturer. He is not a recruiter standing at a checkpoint sorting boys by age. He is a cartoonist sitting at a digital tablet, drawing a child character with warmth and skill for a magazine that exists to narrow that child’s world to a single slogan, a single enemy, a single acceptable future. He does it with the same care he once brought to a workshop in Taiz where children drew the republican eagle under a banner that said “My Beloved Yemen.” That is what makes it evil. Not the intention, which may well be sincere. But the function, which is to close a child’s eyes using a gift that was built to open them.

Political cartoons aimed at adults are, in the end, limited in what they can do because adults bring their own frameworks and can choose to accept or reject what they are shown. Work aimed at children operates on an entirely different plane, and it is here that Sharaf may be more dangerous than any weapon system in the Houthis’ arsenal. When he illustrates a publication that reaches children as young as four, he is not making an argument that can be countered. He is building the architecture inside which all future arguments will take place. The child does not evaluate the content. The content becomes the child. A generation of Yemeni children is growing up inside a visual world that Sharaf helped construct, one in which hatred is moral clarity, martyrdom is aspiration, and the only heroes are the ones holding weapons. By the time these children are old enough to encounter a different version of the world, the first version will have become so deeply embedded that it will feel not like ideology but like memory, like something they have always known, like something that was always true

He wrote in 2014 that the real intellectuals open people’s eyes to the truth, and that the fake ones are afraid of understanding, because they would be the first to be exposed.

He was right.

And the children reading Jehad Magazine will never know it.

Gallery- Collection of Articles and Kamal Sharaf Visual Propaganda

The Dissident Years of Kamal Sharaf

The Artist in the Axis System

Wartime and Peacetime Strategies

Inside the Production Line

The Youngest Recipients

Read more

Week in Brief

Iranian state coverage treated the negotiation track in Moscow as a Trump retreat dressed in diplomatic language. Iranian commentary opened with the claim that Trump was “seeking through negotiation what he failed to achieve in war,” and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s takeover of the Islamabad-track negotiating team was framed as wartime hardening rather than a softening. At the same time, Iran’s UN envoy was placing legal liability for any Hormuz disruption on Washington and its allies. Hardline commentary sharpened into a claim that “America is the loser of the war and has no right to set conditions” and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were “humiliated” and “looking for scapegoats.”

Running underneath the diplomatic coverage was a sustained effort to inflate Iranian capability for a domestic audience that has just come through a forty-day war with the United States. Only “part of” Iran’s missile capacity was used in the fighting, the press claimed. Fifteen “American heavy missiles” had been discovered and neutralized inside Hormozgan province on the Iranian Gulf coast. And Hormuz must not return to its prewar state, per a wartime instruction attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei. The argument the press is making to its own readers is that Iran won, that it has reserves it has not even drawn on, and that the Supreme Leader’s circle is personally directing what comes next.

Alongside this, Iranian state media maintained continuous coverage of nightly rallies in Iranian cities, framed as popular support for the leadership and the armed forces. Tasnim Arabic carried footage from Revolution Square in Tehran with the caption “Iran of Imam Reza and the soldiers of Sayyid Mojtaba,” and parallel Persian-language framings across hardline papers connected Mojtaba to the religious legitimacy of Imam Reza. The mobilization apparatus is doing the same domestic-loyalty work the Houthis do with the Sarkha rallies, and the religious-genealogy framing is the same kind of move: locating regime authority in sacred lineage rather than in negotiated outcomes.

Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese coverage documented Israeli strikes in south Lebanon, including the killing of journalist Amal Khalil, and presented Hezbollah drone retaliation as legal response rather than escalation. Coverage delegitimized Lebanese state diplomacy with Israel as either capitulation or, in one banner phrase, a “submissive authority that begs the enemy” (سلطة صاغرة تتوسّل العدو). The language cast the Lebanese state as no longer a sovereign actor but a supplicant. Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem drew the political line that follows from this. The resistance, he said, is “not bound by the results of the authority’s negotiations.” The same outlets insisted no Iran deal is legitimate that does not include Lebanon as a guaranteed party.

Russian state outlets used the Iran file as evidence of two things their established narrative wants: U.S. military overextension and NATO alliance friction. A Politico report on a White House NATO-contributions list became, in their hands, evidence of a tiered, disciplinary alliance. Trump’s order for the U.S. Navy to fire on vessels laying mines in Hormuz was rendered as escalatory desperation rather than enforcement. Standard battlefield coverage continued at full volume on Ukraine, with the Bockovo capture amplified across the wires. The strongest material concentrated in a set of named-officials items: Rubio admitting Iran retained half its prewar missile arsenal, Rubio calling the straits “the economic equivalent of nuclear weapons,” and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s commentary that Vance and Rubio “may turn away from Trump.”

Chinese state coverage is split between cautious official wires and aggressive commentary sites. The state news agency tracked the Pakistan envoy's trip and its subsequent cancellation in close sequence, and ran explainers tying the Lebanon-Israel ceasefire to the U.S.-Iran track. Chinese state-affiliated commentary noted that Trump was “putting on a brave face,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz quoted as saying “the whole United States has been humiliated by Iran,” NATO considering canceling its 2028 summit to avoid friction with Trump, and a Thai foreign minister saying Bangkok turned to Beijing and Moscow because Washington “did not help at all.”

The Houthis remain focused on extracting ideological loyalty in their territory inside Yemen while Iran carries the diplomatic foreground. Friday rallies for the Sarkha, the movement’s founding chant, spread across multiple governorates, with parallel events in the military regions of Hodeidah and Taiz. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the movement’s leader, did not deliver a fresh speech inside this window, and the most senior Houthi voice came through the Sana’a Foreign Ministry’s warning that continued Israeli action against Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran could “drag the region into a wider war.” That register is diplomatic, not military.

Read more

April 27 update: Iran's foreign minister flew to Moscow tonight after Trump canceled his envoys' trip to Islamabad. The visit makes visible what this piece argues. Tehran's diplomatic universe is nar…

Read more

Read more

Two Weeks in Brief

Although Trump declared the April 5 operation to rescue a downed F-15 pilot near Isfahan a success, Iran pointed to a different outcome. The IRGC’s joint operational command Khatam al-Anbiya, Iran’s wartime military headquarters, said the rescue attempt had cost Washington multiple aircraft, and warned that any targeting of Iranian civilian infrastructure “will open the gates of hell on you,” naming U.S. and Israeli sites “used militarily” anywhere in the region as fair game for retaliation. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called U.S. threats against Iranian energy facilities a war crime.

Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis pushed the “all fronts are one” claim across the period. The slogan was “وحدة الساحات” unity of arenas, and it appeared across every outlet. The IRGC named Yemen in strike communiqués covering operations the Houthis did not conduct. On April 9, the 40th day of mourning for Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media aired a written statement attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, whom regime-aligned outlets have been presenting as the new Supreme Leader. Allegedly, Mojtaba Khamenei declared that Iran considers “all resistance fronts as a unified entity.” See the April 1–7 and April 8–14 Houthis’ Lane briefs for a fuller picture on how Axis Media manufactured this framing while the Houthis themselves did not fire on Israel during the ceasefire week.

The ceasefire Trump announced on April 7 and the ceasefire Iran said it had accepted were not the same deal. Washington said Lebanon was outside the scope while Iran said it was inside. Iran’s preconditions ran across Lebanon, the release of frozen assets, and a reparations track. Vice President JD Vance told Russian outlets Israel was ready to limit Lebanon strikes for the sake of a deal, while warning Washington would not uphold the ceasefire unless Iran opened Hormuz. Islamabad talks broke down within a day of starting on April 11, oil crossed $140, and by April 14 the United States had announced a maritime blockade Iran was already working to delegitimize.

Russia stepped in as the ceasefire’s narrative amplifier. The Russian MFA said “some forces are slowing the movement toward peace” and called publicly for Israel to stop the Lebanon strikes. A TASS explainer positioned Pakistan as the key mediator. China stepped back. On April 7, Beijing vetoed a UN Security Council resolution from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE calling for a forced reopening of Hormuz. On April 11, Guancha published a long commentary explicitly rejecting the Western narrative that “China forced Iran” into the ceasefire. The Chinese MFA told Xinhua it was engaging all parties.

The Deep Dives below cover the rescue episode, the “unity of arenas” doctrine, Iran’s staged succession of Mojtaba Khamenei, the Islamabad breakdown, Lebanon during the ceasefire, Russia and China on mediation, and Iran’s reparations campaign against the Gulf.

Deep Dive

1. Rescue Mission and “Gates of Hell.”

On April 5, Trump announced on social media that a U.S. attempt to rescue a downed F-15 pilot near Isfahan had succeeded. The IRGC’s joint operational command Khatam al-Anbiya, Iran’s wartime military headquarters, said that Washington had in fact lost multiple aircraft during the attempt, claiming two C-130 transports and two Black Hawk helicopters had been destroyed. Within hours, Tasnim was publishing photos of what it called U.S. aircraft wreckage as proof, while Russian coverage ran the Iranian version with the headline “The enemy’s efforts failed.”

The IRGC paired the rescue claim with an explicit warning. In the same statement, Khatam al-Anbiya told Trump directly that targeting Iranian civilian infrastructure “will open the gates of hell on you,” naming U.S. and Israeli sites “used militarily” anywhere in the region as legitimate targets for retaliation. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called U.S. threats against Iranian energy facilities a war crime.

Hezbollah-aligned outlets carried opinion coverage that worked the rescue episode hard. Al-Manar ran a column by Alloush titled “Trump: victories narrated… defeats lived,” arguing U.S. messaging was storytelling while real costs were borne on the battlefield. Al-Akhbar’s April 1 analysis framed Israeli losses in the Iran war as a turning point in the regional deterrence equation. Al-Ahed published a piece arguing Netanyahu was “fabricating” his victory and that regime overthrow rhetoric had collapsed.

Iranian outlets published a sustained Tasnim column titled “The ghost of Vietnam in the Middle East; Iran becomes the graveyard of American aggressors,” arguing Washington was repeating the hubris of earlier wars and that geography, the Strait of Hormuz, and the resistance network made Iran a far more lethal theater than Vietnam had been.

Houthi outlets worked the rescue episode as outright deception. Al-Thawrah published an opinion piece titled “The failure of the deceptive American rescue operation,” arguing the U.S. operation was not a genuine rescue at all but a cover story, and that its actual purpose was testing Iranian ground defenses in southwest Iran. 26 September ran a companion column titled “Suicide of Grandeur: Trump trapped in psychological defeat and the end of the unipolar era,” which folded the rescue episode into a civilizational-decline narrative about the end of a unipolar era.

Chinese outlets published a Guancha commentary titled “A scam from start to finish: how the U.S. and Israel ‘negotiated’ with Iran,” arguing that diplomatic overtures had functioned as cover for initiating the strikes and assassinations that opened the war, and framing the entire negotiation track as premeditated deception rather than failed diplomacy.

2. How Iran Turned “Unity of Arenas” Into a Ceasefire Veto

Throughout April, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis framed strikes on Israel from Lebanese, Yemeni, and Iranian territory as a single coordinated campaign. The slogan was “وحدة الساحات” — unity of arenas — and it ran across every outlet. Coverage of the April 3 “One Axis, One Rank” rallies treated Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq as a single theater.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Houthi social media, opinion writers, the parliament, and the foreign ministry had all issued statements. The political council floated Yemeni sovereignty over Bab al-Mandeb, which is the usual bluster we have come to expect from the Houthis. The foreign ministry framed the ceasefire as an opportunity for Gulf states to rethink their alliances with Washington, while Houthi outlets examined and gleefully amplified US and Israeli self-criticism, from the New York Times to Ma’ariv. Throughout all of it, Houthi officials and Iranian state media in Arabic reinforced each other in a closed loop designed to look like a consensus.

Naturally, the Houthis need this to be their victory because, without Iran’s war, they are a movement governing one-third of a country that has slipped from the center of regional priorities. The ceasefire gave them twenty-four hours of relevance, and they used every minute of it. Here is what we found.

The first theme we observed was straightforward triumphalism, as expected, and this was emphasized by many senior leaders in the Houthi establishment. Their Shura Council member (Abdulsalam Jahaf) mocked both Trump and Netanyahu for finding themselves a way out and called Trump “the liar of the age.” A member of the Political Bureau (Salim Al-Moghales) stated that Trump spoke about Iran’s conditions with deference, which is bizarre given the apocalyptic framing Trump had adopted barely a day before. Naturally, their framing was unambiguous. The ceasefire was not a negotiated outcome but a capitulation of the United States, extracted by force.

The second was the insistence that no ceasefire is legitimate unless it includes Lebanon, a threat that gained urgency following Israel’s unexpected strikes after the announcement, roughly a hundred missiles in ten minutes. Jahaf warned that Iran would withdraw from the agreement if strikes on Lebanon continued, which is interesting because he was speaking on behalf of Tehran. The head of the Houthis’ Media Authority amplified Araghchi’s statement that America must choose between a full ceasefire and war through Israel. This is worth noting because last year, the Houthis had their very own ceasefire with the United States but continued to attack Israel without a problem. In any case, the purpose here is for the Houthis to keep the conflict frame alive and position themselves as stakeholders in theaters well beyond Yemen, which is what they have been doing recently.

Read more

Iranian officials will never admit defeat, and some conversations have made it conventional wisdom, repeated with increasing confidence as the war intensifies, that the Islamic Republic will never capitulate. And it is clear why this is the case. Iran’s ideological architecture is too deep, its revolutionary identity too fused with the state apparatus, and its commitment to resisting the United States too structurally embedded to permit surrender under any conditions. So what follows is an understanding that pressure may degrade the regime’s capability but cannot alter its intent, and that the Islamic Republic can absorb punishment indefinitely because it understands itself to be engaged in a civilizational struggle in which compromise is indistinguishable from extinction.

I’ll admit there is something seductive about this line of thinking. But if we accept that no other outcome exists, we stop looking for one, and we start treating the regime’s own narrative about itself as an analytical conclusion rather than as a political performance, and in doing so, we foreclose the very possibilities that might otherwise be available to us. The word “ideological” does a lot of work in the current discourse, and it does so poorly. It functions less as a description of how the Islamic Republic operates and more as a shorthand for “irrational” or “impervious to incentives.” That conflation does not clarify the problem but rather obscures it.

The Theocratic Problem

To understand why this feels so intuitive, it may help to distinguish between political ideology and religious ideology, because they make fundamentally different kinds of claims.

Read more

If you listen to Abd al-Malik al-Houthi’s speeches every week, as I do, you would think the group is about to open a second front against America and Israel. The language is apocalyptic. The promises are absolute. Rallies fill al-Sabeen Square in Sanaa. Fighters parade through every governorate. The movement that spent two years disrupting global shipping and launching ballistic missiles at Israel has told its followers, repeatedly and without qualification, that it stands ready to act “at any moment.”

But suppose they act. What does that war actually look like, and what would it take to sustain it?

Take the Red Sea campaign, which the Houthis said they launched in support of Gaza. Since November 2023, the group has carried out more than 100 attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, but that campaign consumed their weapons at a fairly high rate, exposed critical infrastructure, and invited sustained American and Israeli strikes on launch sites, storage facilities, and fuel tanks at Ras al-Issa. By 2025, the numbers had begun to decline and came to a momentary halt. Whether the Houthis stopped firing due to ceasefires, truces, or depleted stocks is debatable, but what is clear is that the tempo never returned to its 2024 levels and the arsenal that sustained it struggled to be replenished.

If we examine their attacks against Israel, the Houthis had launched approximately 40 ballistic missiles and more than 320 drones according to the IDF, but roughly a fifth to a quarter of the ballistic missiles failed en route, more than 100 drones were intercepted, and only two struck populated areas. By early September, Israeli media reported 80 ballistic missiles and at least 31 drones launched since the resumption. Despite these failures, the movement publicly treated the campaign as a success because it forced nationwide alarms and disrupted Israeli air traffic. But in doing so, they were also making a bet that a few Israeli lives and fear are worth more than Yemeni security or Israeli retaliation.

The cost of that campaign was not only material. Israeli airstrikes in 2025 killed the Houthi prime minister, about a dozen cabinet members, and Chief of the General Staff Muhammad al-Ghamari. The political leadership was easily replaced, but Ghamari was important because of the role he played in establishing the Houthis’ missile systems and weapons-production infrastructure. He was trained by Hezbollah and the IRGC, and his expertise could not be replaced by appointing a brother-in-law.

Sustained pressure on the movement and naval interdictions choked whatever remained of the resupply line. The July 2025 seizure of over 750 tons of Iranian-origin materiel showed how much the group relied on imports to sustain its production capacity. So while the Houthis can still launch, every launch depletes their limited reserves and reveals positions that have already been mapped, and the surviving commanders saw what happened to the last ones who generated those signatures. The critical bottleneck is not finished weapons but the components needed to build them: seekers, guidance electronics, and engines. Each requires an import, and every import requires smuggling. The scale of that smuggling is visible in what has been caught. The U.S. Treasury has designated Chinese firms for supplying machining tools and manufacturing equipment to the Houthis, and an Oman-based logistics company was sanctioned for transferring cruise missile components into Yemen.

The Houthis’ supply chain has also been interrupted repeatedly. In October 2025, Yemeni authorities seized 58 containers at the Port of Aden with about 2,500 tons of drone manufacturing equipment. For every shipment intercepted, others have gotten through, but the current environment is more vigilant than before, the seas around Yemen are more surveilled than ever, and Iran’s own situation does not allow it to sustain smuggling or production capacity for all of its proxies at once. The Houthis are trying to build domestic production capacity because they know smuggling cannot be relied on forever, but that is a project measured in years, and a war tomorrow requires components not in the warehouse today. With Iran under sustained bombardment, the pipeline that built the Houthis’ arsenal is not functioning.

But none of this matters as much as the fuel, because fuel is what keeps the Houthi state alive. Iranian oil enters Yemen through a network of front companies with direct ties to the IRGC, arriving at Houthi-controlled ports at Hodeidah and Ras Isa and sold domestically at inflated prices. The UN Panel of Experts estimated the Houthis collected approximately $4 billion from customs duties on fuel imports alone between 2022 and 2024, with total income from the fuel sector reaching roughly $5.5 billion. Houthi leaders have also been negotiating future oil deals with Russian government representatives.

That fuel supply has been under pressure well before the current war with Iran. Israeli strikes have hit those ports and their fuel infrastructure, the Trump administration ended the general license allowing petroleum offloading at Houthi ports in April 2025, and Treasury has sanctioned the terminals, port managers, and vessels still making deliveries. The war on Iran now threatens the source itself, and any Houthi escalation from here does not just risk airstrikes on missile sites but invites a scenario in which fuel restrictions tighten further, deliveries stop entirely, and the one thing keeping the Houthi state functional disappears. Without fuel, there are no salaries, no revenue, and no state to administer, which is what running on fumes actually means.

Along with fuel, the Houthis are sustained by broader networks, having spent years building smuggling and logistics channels into the Horn of Africa that have become central to their survival. The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen in its October 2025 final report found that cooperation with al-Shabaab now involves weapons smuggling, technical training, and logistical support as part of a deliberate strategy to expand regional influence. In recent years, Somalia has been “increasingly” used as a transit hub for weapons destined for the Houthis, with multiple routes running through Somali ports, and a captured Houthi operative confessed in February 2025 to five arms smuggling runs between Yemen and Somalia in late 2024.

Adding to this is a cooperation with al-Qaeda that has gone largely undetected for years. The same UN report confirmed that the ceasefire between the Houthis and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains in effect, with both parties exchanging prisoners as recently as March 2025, and that collaboration includes the training of AQAP operatives and intelligence coordination. These networks move components, money, and fighters, and act as the connective tissue between the Houthi state and the outside world.

So suppose they launch, and they fire what they have, and they hit a ship, or a base, or a city. What happens on day two? Can the Houthis either defend their position or sustain an attack? What happens to their plans of taking over the rest of Yemen, a plan in which they have mobilized manpower and built an army from a collection of tribes, loyalists, and through coercion of the rest who live under their control? Can they sustain the retaliation that follows, and the bitter reality that such retaliation cannot escape collateral damage, a brutality that Yemenis never asked for?

While the world waits for a Houthi missile aimed outward, the weapons the Houthis are actually using are pointed at Yemenis. Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city, has been under Houthi siege for over nine years, and Houthi forces attacked army positions west of the city this week. In Hajjah, an artillery attack on a village killed at least ten people, including six children, as they gathered for iftar. Houthi landmines continue to kill civilians across the country. The ground force the movement has been assembling through mass conscription is not designed to fight America or Israel but to hold territory and subjugate the population living on it. The movement that told the Arab world it was fighting for Palestine is spending its remaining capacity on controlling Yemenis and serving a patron that is itself on fire.

But the Houthis may still fire, not to enter a war but to exit one with their reputation intact. If negotiations involving Iran begin to advance, the Houthis will feel pressure to launch something, because sitting it out entirely is not an option for a movement that told its fighters this was a divine cause, and not an option in front of an Iranian network watching to see which of its proxies still function. A strike timed to that moment would not mean they have rebuilt anything. It would mean they are spending what little they have left to avoid looking already finished.

The Houthis appear to be gambling that the war on Iran will be short, that the regime will survive under Mojtaba Khamenei, that the IRGC will rebuild, and that the smuggling networks and fuel pipelines will eventually resume. Their entire posture is built on holding on rather than fighting, and waiting for the supply lines to come back. But there is one resource the Houthis are not running low on, and that is ideology. The speeches will continue, and the apocalyptic framing will intensify. The media apparatus will keep producing images of strength, unity, and divine purpose. When the missiles are depleted and the fuel stops flowing, ideology is what fills the gap, and it is the last thing a movement like this runs out of, and the most dangerous, because it can sustain a war against a population long after it has lost the capacity to fight anyone else.

I published this article today for the Stimson Center to explain the Houthis’ month-long delay and how to read their launch from an operational standpoint.

The evidence shows that the interdiction campaign launched last year has effectively degraded the Houthis’ supply chain. Bandar Abbas is under bombardment. Shipments are being intercepted at sea. The fuel infrastructure has been hit by Israeli strikes and U.S. Treasury sanctions. The last seized cargo heading to Hodeidah was copper wire and medicines. Their ability to launch is constrained and reliant on smuggling routes being squeezed from all sides.

That said, the risk cannot be eliminated. Reports from Yemen’s internationally recognized government indicate that IRGC personnel entered Hodeidah by dhow from the Horn of Africa in the days before the March 28 launch. If personnel can still get in, so can components, and the threat can escalate.

For the full breakdown, read the piece here at the Stimson Center

Read more