An Iranian airliner circling above a cratered runway at Sanaa is the clearest picture of what Iran is trying to establish on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Saudi-led coalition strike on July 13 did more than turn back a sanctioned Mahan Air flight carrying a Houthi delegation home from the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was an attempt to interrupt Iran’s effort to establish a permanent air link into Houthi-controlled territory that no one outside Sanaa could inspect. Land and maritime routes have come under increasing pressure from interdiction since 2024, and Iran is running its pipeline through a civilian airport because covert routes are gone.

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The strike on Sanaa airport was a fight over inspection, access, and recognition as Iran tries to build in Yemen a proxy similar to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The dispute was never about whether a plane could land. Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Presidential Leadership Council, said the government offered to bring the Houthi delegation home aboard a Yemenia charter, but the Houthis insisted on Mahan Air, an airline under U.S. sanctions for moving weapons and personnel for the Quds Force, the external branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Flights into Sanaa can land under existing arrangements if they route through a Jordanian airport for inspection. The Houthis allegedly refused this option, making it clear that the objection was never to the route, but to the inspection mechanism. In the end, the plane landed at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah.

The Houthis retaliated within hours, striking Abha airport in Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones and warning airlines away from Saudi airspace until what they call the blockade on Sanaa is lifted.

The crisis has been building for the past two months as the Houthis have escalated their rhetoric against Saudi Arabia, accusing the Kingdom of imposing a humanitarian blockade. But at the core, both the Houthis and Iran have set their sights higher. They want to displace Yemen’s internationally recognized government and install the Houthis as a de facto governing authority.

The operation suggests that both Tehran and the Houthis calculated that Riyadh would target the runway rather than the aircraft because the risks of downing a funeral delegation on a civilian carrier was not an acceptable political cost, which left the Kingdom to crater the runway and force a diversion.

The incident highlights a critical aspect of Tehran’s regional strategy. Iran does not build proxy power exclusively with missiles, but by capturing the physical infrastructure through which state sovereignty is exercised. International gateways are among the clearest expressions of that sovereignty, because they determine how a state meets the outside world, who enters and on whose terms. Iran is exploiting a moment of regional instability, lashing out across the Persian Gulf through asymmetric pressure over the Strait of Hormuz and through proxies, in an effort to exhaust Washington’s appetite for holding the line.

What looks like a sudden escalation is the resumption of a project that began over a decade ago. In February 2015, just weeks after the Houthis seized Sanaa, their leadership signed an aviation agreement with Tehran authorizing fourteen weekly flights, with the first Mahan Air service landing on March 1 under humanitarian cover. That flight carried IRGC and Hezbollah advisers alongside arms and logistical supplies, and later that month, a shipment of roughly 180 tons of weapons was intercepted at Saleef Port in Hodeidah. Back then, the Saudi-led Operation Decisive Storm closed the corridor after the coalition took control of Yemeni airspace, and the runway at Sanaa was struck that year to stop Iranian aircraft from landing. Eleven years later, the same airport is being struck for the same reason, this time to keep the IRGC from restoring the corridor.

Iran ran the same play in Beirut long before applying it to Sanaa. Rafic Hariri International Airport, positioned next to Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs, became the critical asset. Controlling the airport and the roads allowed Iran to move cash and materiel through uninspected diplomatic bags.

When the Lebanese government in June reopened René Moawad Airport at Qlayaat, in a northern region outside Hezbollah’s reach, the response was immediate. For Hezbollah, a second airport meant a route into the country that did not pass through Dahieh, that it could not watch or tax or close, and that the state could use to bypass the movement entirely. The party’s own channel ran Prime Minister Nawaf Salam insisting that Qlayaat was not a replacement for Beirut’s airport, a reassurance no one would give unless the replacement were exactly the point. For Hezbollah, the value of controlling Beirut’s airport depends on there being no alternative to it.

A link to the full article can be found here on the Stimson Center website.

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What I could not understand is why that delegation was on that plane to begin with, as Saudi warplanes had tried to turn the same aircraft back when it first traveled to Iran. There is no way the passengers did not know a second attempt was coming and that their lives were on the line. However, they boarded anyway, and they were still in the air when the strip beneath them was blown out.

There are reports that the Yemeni government, which has been fighting the militia and claimed responsibility for the runway attack, facilitated another way home. And this is often the usual most preferred route for negotiations which could have easily been routed through Jordan and submitted to inspection. However, it is plausible that Tehran insisted on this flight because there was cargo aboard, such as missile components, that Iran wanted moved without anyone looking at them. But even if we accept that Iran was intent on smuggling through air, it is still an enormous risk for the Houthis to take.

The calculation that KSA might not strike the plane is plausible, given that the Saudis have learned to contain their conventional power after years of war with the Houthis. But it also points to an escalation that Iran and the Houthis seem able to afford. Which is why the Red Sea is more exposed today than it was at the start of the war. Three things follow, and I want to walk through them in order, because each is a step in the same progression.

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One. There was no move Riyadh could make that Tehran had not already priced.

Look at who was actually on that plane. Nasr al-Din Amer, who chairs the Houthi media board at SABA, and other delegation members senior enough to be worth photographing.

The most senior man aboard was the movement’s mufti, Shams al-Din Sharaf al-Din, who has spent the past period stepping up to the pulpit on the leadership’s behalf. The Yemeni journalist Faris al-Himyari reported today that Sharaf al-Din wanted to stay behind in Tehran and travel on to India for medical treatment, and that according to his source he was refused, since the leadership barred him from remaining and forced him back aboard the Iranian aircraft that ultimately landed in Houthi-controlled Hodeidah.

If it were me, I would not have boarded either. He did not get the choice.

The flight had two possible endings and Tehran was covered by both. Land it, and the corridor is established. Hit it, and the corridor is established anyway, along with the reason to escalate over having been denied it.

Look at what Riyadh was left with. Striking the aircraft was never an option for the Saudis, not only because of a humanitarian concern but also because of what it would have done to their standing. A downed civilian plane “carrying patients“ and a returning delegation is a story the Kingdom cannot survive, and it invites retaliation. So they hit the runway instead, which was the cheaper option, and the cheaper option handed Iran a corridor that stays open, an aircraft that landed safely, and a grievance with witnesses. Riyadh chose the least costly move available, and it was still a win for Tehran.

The escalation began when the Saudi-backed Yemeni government announced the strike on the airport on Monday, and the Houthis answered by hitting Abha and declaring a ban on Saudi airspace, warning airlines not to cross, and all of it fits a pattern in which the confrontation itself is the objective, particularly given that this delegation was returning from Khamenei’s funeral in Tehran. Tehran had already committed itself in public. On July 4, Araghchi announced that Iran was prepared to mobilize all of its diplomatic capabilities to lift the blockade on Yemen and fully implement the peace roadmap. He said that ten days before the runway was destroyed, and the flight was the first practical test of it. Once Riyadh signaled it would deny the route, every subsequent flight became useful to Iran whether it landed or not. And for the first time in a long while the escalation now points at the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb, where Iran has wanted leverage for years and has never been able to justify taking it. It is the Houthi story of having been wronged, of aggression absorbed and answered, that lets the two of them move in tandem.

Two. Iran wants for the Houthis what it already won for Hezbollah.

This might look like a Saudi-Houthi escalation, but a sanctioned aircraft went into the sky, and it went because Iran was behind it.

The heart of this remains an Iran-United States confrontation in which Tehran is running the fight through a proxy so that Washington and Riyadh spend themselves against the proxy rather than against the state. The Houthis, in this instance, are implementing Iran’s strategy and advocating for Iran’s interests rather than Yemen’s, and by parroting the threats on Bab al-Mandeb and on the Kingdom they become the megaphone through which Iran projects a deterrent it would otherwise have to project itself, and pay for itself. The sovereignty claim works the same way, since a sovereign Sana’a is an uninspected Sana’a, and an uninspected Sana’a is a corridor.

So in this instance, escalation back and forth, and Saudi attacks on Yemen in particular, would be perfectly useful to Iran, which can then rope the Houthis into its memorandum of understanding with the United States in the same way it tried to rope in Hezbollah, negotiating on behalf of its proxy and extracting further concessions while paying nothing for the fighting that produces the leverage. It is a bar Iran has cleared before, in Lebanon, on the same terms and against the same objections, which is why Riyadh should recognize what it is being walked into, having already watched it done to Beirut.

The Houthis claim that this was a violation of sovereignty, which is a strange thing to claim, because it is not something that they have. But it goes to something the movement cares about more than almost anything else. They despise being called a militia, which is why they insist on Ansar Allah, the supporters of God, and why they have confiscated the ministries and run them as a government. What they want is recognition, and they are pursuing it through Iran, and increasingly through Russia and China, which I wrote about for AGSI. Deciding who lands at Sana’a is that whole project compressed into a single airport.

But consider what is actually being asked for here. An armed group is demanding the right to open its own airspace to a sanctioned foreign carrier, and to refuse inspection while doing it. There is no version of the international system that survives granting that, and no state in the region would grant it to anyone else. If Iran wanted the corridor and not the crisis, it would have taken Jordan. The route was open. The inspection was the only cost, and the inspection was the entire point of refusing. Whatever is moving through an uninspected Sana’a is what the Houthis will eventually aim at the Red Sea, which is the only reason any of this is worth the crisis.

Three. Iran is frustrated, and Bab al-Mandeb is where it could answer.

Tehran is growing frustrated with Trump’s claims about Hormuz, that the strait is open and functioning under American guarantee, when the Iranians insist it is closed and under their control. The argument is running in public, and it is difficult to bear for a state that has just absorbed more than eighty American strikes across its southern provinces for the privilege of holding a waterway it cannot actually use. That frustration has to go somewhere, however, and it will not go to Hormuz, where Iran pays for everything it does, which leaves the Red Sea, where it pays for nothing.

If Iran wanted to strike Bab al-Mandeb directly, it appears that it can. In March it fired ballistic missiles at a joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia, roughly 3,800 kilometers away, and let the world watch it happen.

Which brings me to the flaw at the center of the Islamabad MOU, which I have written about last month, since the text does not mention ballistic missiles at all. Asked about that on June 18, JD Vance said you cannot tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, that it has no right to defend itself, and that what the deal would prevent is Iran building the kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world. But Diego Garcia is not the world. It is 3,800 kilometers, and it is regional by the standard Vance himself set, and so is Bab al-Mandeb at 2,300. The category he carved out as a legitimate defense is the one that puts a global shipping lane within Iran's reach, and Iran had demonstrated that reach three months before he said it.

Firing directly into Bab al-Mandeb, however, would cost Tehran the ambiguity it has been living on, since it would alert Washington to the reach and hand the administration a reason to walk back the memorandum. Which is why the proxy remains useful. The Houthis are how Iran gets the pressure without the attribution.

I have said consistently that the Houthis would not close Bab al-Mandeb, attacks yes and closure no, and I am not revising that now, though I want to be honest about what has changed and what has not. My assessment rested partly on interdiction, on the fact that the components were being caught before they arrived, and the flights into Sana’a are an attempt to change exactly that, so it is possible that enough has landed to make the movement more confident than it was. I still doubt they can sustain a closure, since a handful of flights does not rebuild an arsenal. But sustaining it may not be what is required of them.

What the Houthis need alongside the weapons is a justification, and they have spent the past two months building one. The blockade did not enter their vocabulary until recently, and it has now become the frame for everything, the reason the airport matters, the reason the airspace matters, the reason a response is owed. A movement under siege has a case, and the case is what lets Iran act on its behalf. And Iran does not need to close anything to collect, since it only needs the underwriters to believe that it might, and the world pays that premium long before anything is launched.

Watch this closely, because the outcome will not be settled in Yemen. The Islamabad memorandum may not survive the month. Iran says it is finished, Washington is blockading, and nobody defends it. But something will replace it, because something always does, and whatever comes next will have to price the Red Sea, since that is what Tehran will carry to the table. Everything happening at Bab al-Mandeb between now and then is bargaining, nothing more, a way of establishing what Iran will have to be paid to stop doing something it never intended to do permanently. There is still no consistent strategy anywhere for dealing with any of it. The Houthis will absorb the strikes, and Iran will collect the concessions.

Video of the strike as shown in Houthi media.

Among this week's developments: a NATO summit in Ankara, a state funeral in Tehran, Iranian Revolutionary Guard attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a widening Houthi front in Yemen, and the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding. Read together, they describe what Iran is doing next, and what Russia and China are willing to underwrite.

The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 and 8 named Russia a long-term threat and pledged Ukraine military assistance for 2026. Russian and Chinese state commentary read the summit as evidence of Western disarray and American decline. From Ankara on July 8, Trump declared the ceasefire and the Islamabad memorandum with Iran over. The announcement followed several days of escalation, with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard firing on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz on July 6, and the United States revoking its waiver on Iranian oil and striking targets across southern Iran on July 7, citing Iran’s violation of the memorandum.

Prior to the escalation, Iran held the state funeral of Ali Khamenei beginning July 3, four months after American and Israeli strikes killed him in Tehran on February 28. The procession moved from the Tehran prayer ground to Qom, then across the border to the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, and toward Mashhad for burial. Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iraqi militia leadership joined the processions and called the turnout proof of victory over the United States and Israel.

Week in Brief

Russia continued to invest in an image of a weaker Ukraine and a declining United States. Several commentaries described the July 2 Russian strike on Kyiv as punishment rather than retaliation, and coverage of the July 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara framed the alliance as unraveling with Russia as the beneficiary.

Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis took particular interest in America’s July 4 250th anniversary to make a case for American decline, drawing on Western press quotes, Chinese academic analysis, Iranian officials, and Houthi opinion pieces.

Iran held a seven-day state funeral for Ali Khamenei from July 3, four months after the American and Israeli strike that killed him on February 28. The state framed the mass turnout as evidence that the order Khamenei led had not been broken by his killing. The procession moved from the Tehran prayer ground to Qom to the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, with burial planned in Mashhad on July 9.

On the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard fired on three commercial vessels transiting the strait on July 6 and 7. The United States revoked its sanctions waiver on Iranian oil and, on July 7, CENTCOM struck more than eighty targets in southern Iran. Tehran replied through its parliament speaker and lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who accused Washington of major violations of the Islamabad memorandum.

The Houthi militia conducted a coordinated escalation across land, sea, and air, timed to the funeral week and to the Iran-US Hormuz confrontation.

Dmitry Medvedev with the Russian delegation before Ali Khamenei's casket in Tehran, July 3, 2026. Iran chose Al-Qasas 28:83 for the Russian approach, praising "those who do not desire exaltedness upon the earth or corruption."

NATO in Ankara, and the argument of Western disarray

Although Russia is not a NATO member and had no seat at the Ankara summit, its state media followed the proceedings closely. Moscow sees itself as the beneficiary of every alliance rift and is keen on conveying this posture through state media as a way to reassure its own public of its eventual resilience. A couple of details were amplified. Trump was quoted saying he “might not have come” to the summit had it been held anywhere but Turkey, offered as evidence that American commitment to the alliance is thinning. The Turkish analyst Nijat Sezgin was cited arguing that Ankara had deliberately sent its culture and tourism minister to receive Zelensky at the airport rather than a foreign policy official, to signal that the visit was protocol, not politically significant. Moscow appeared to relish the framing. And on the Trump-Zelensky meeting itself, Russian state commentary amplified a piece by the Ukrainian outlet Strana.ua, arguing that Trump’s promises about Patriot missile production licenses “look more like informational preparation for negotiations with Moscow than practical steps to support Ukraine.”

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The sea of black-clad mourners and predictable dignitaries filling the funeral procession in Tehran today for Ali Khamenei offered few surprises. The usual cast of regional proxies and traditional Iran allies gathered to pay their respects to Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the US-Israel war on Iran. So did dozens of other countries, from Russia and China to India, Malaysia, and Tunisia, a roster that cut across religion and ideology alike. Yet what forced the double take was the presence of a mid-tier Saudi Arabian delegation, headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed El Khereiji. After months of watching Saudi Arabia get battered by the IRGC establishment during the war on Iran, seeing Saudi officials navigate a crowd that included the very militant leaders who have targeted their infrastructure was surreal. It was also a reminder of how much realpolitik drives Riyadh’s calculation with Iran. Whatever it looked like, it was a transaction, not a thaw, and mistaking the presence for partnership puts the region exactly backward.

The optics are difficult for a Saudi Kingdom that keeps reaching for de-escalation and keeps being handed something else. For the first hours, Saudi coverage carried the funeral procession but there was no coverage of its own delegation standing in it. Tehran chose a Quranic verse for each delegation as it approached the casket. The Houthis got a verse praising those who stand with the Prophet, severe against disbelievers, merciful among themselves. The Russians, represented by Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, got a verse on those who "do not desire exaltedness upon the earth," an ironic fit for a power waging a war of territorial expansion.

The Saudis, however, got a verse that placed the Kingdom among the disbelievers. Khamenei's contempt for the Saudi monarchy was lifelong and personal. Tehran knew Riyadh would read it exactly as intended. Pro-Axis accounts online were already praising the choice as proof of Tehran's command of scripture as a messaging tool.

None of this is lost on Riyadh. The Saudis know exactly where they sit in this equation, close enough to the fire to have been burned by it already, and they came anyway. It is what a state does when it has read the board correctly and does not like what it sees.

For nearly a decade, Saudi Arabia fought Iran’s chief proxy in Yemen largely alone, with little Western help and no guarantee anyone would come if things worsened. The lesson took hold. Riyadh learned to handle Iran itself, which is what it did in March 2023, when it restored relations with Tehran, its chief rival, in a deal brokered in Beijing. Washington was not in the room. It was détente built on wariness, not warmth, and it held for as long as it could, until the United States intervened. The war Washington fought across the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz has left consequences that keep falling on the region and its people, and it produced the opposite of what it intended. It cemented an image of power for Iran and its proxies rather than breaking it.

The Saudis are watching all of this closely and working to limit the risk Iran and its proxies still pose, including, it appears, trying to keep the Houthi delegation from reaching Tehran for the same event. Even as Riyadh’s envoys were paying their condolences, Saudi and Houthi forces were reportedly clashing in the air over Yemen. The Iran-backed Houthis said Saudi warplanes had tried to intercept an Iranian flight carrying their political leadership to the same funeral, and warned they would answer any further violation of their airspace. Within hours, the Saudi-led Coalition responded, vowing to meet any attempt against the Kingdom, its citizens, or its national assets “with unprecedented determination and force.”

The Houthis put their chief military spokesman forward to answer a routine interception, a heavy response to a flight they called humanitarian. What’s reassuring here, especially for anyone who thought Riyadh was quick to normalize with the IRGC, is that Saudi Arabia is still at work behind the scenes to limit the Iran-backed Houthis’ influence around its border and, ultimately, on the Red Sea. Riyadh has learned not to take the humanitarian label at face value, because the group moves weapons as a matter of survival, and its airspace is where that traffic runs. So a high-profile funeral is exactly the kind of moment its supply needs cover. None of this requires knowing what was on the plane, only knowing how the Houthis operate.

Last month the United States signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding with the Iranian regime, a bilateral deal that, as I argued when it was signed, undid nearly every objective the war was fought to secure. It also left the Gulf’s security exactly where it found it. Through its proxies, the Gulf has been the most exposed party in this war, and the American guarantee has never looked thinner than it did under this round of fire. Washington reached a framework with Tehran faster than Saudi Arabia has been able to end its ten-year war of attrition with the Iran-backed Houthis. Tehran's own military leadership turned the funeral into a deterrence platform. According to the Houthi outlet Al-Masirah, Iran's army chief, its IRGC commander, its deputy defense minister, and the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force each vowed on the day of the ceremony that the leader's blood and any breach of the ceasefire would be avenged.

For the Gulf, the memorandum was a bitter pill to swallow. It could not address the threat that actually bears on them, the proxies, the missiles, the drones, and Washington gave little sign of wanting to. That was clearest when the deal granted Iran, like any state, the right to defend itself, the very capability the war was launched to strip away. A state watching its guarantor define the danger this narrowly learns to define it for itself. The attendance of the funeral procession runs on that lesson. Accept a framework you did not write, and keep managing the threats it leaves out.

That is what the delegation in Tehran and the interception over Yemeni airspace amount to, one posture, not two. Riyadh takes the Iran-Houthi threat seriously enough to work every register it has, managing Iran itself because it has stopped assuming Washington will. Of everyone in that room, the Saudis have fought the most recent war with an Iranian proxy and hold the fewest illusions about the relationship with Tehran. Whatever restraint was on display was tactical, the behavior of a state that has read the board, remembers what the last round cost, and trusts no one else to keep the account. What matters is not who stood beside the casket. It is who holds the ground when the talking resumes.

The U.S. President signed it at Versailles, of all places, hosted by the French President he had mocked throughout the war, down to the jab that his wife “treats him extremely badly.” That Macron hosted him anyway tells you how eager Europe was to contain the conflict.

But nothing sat as strangely as the Vice President’s language. He wanted Iran to “behave like a normal country,” to rejoin the international community, to become, he hoped, “successful.” Touching language, if the same administration had not, weeks earlier, warned California law enforcement of unverified reporting that Iran had allegedly aspired to attack the state using drones, and if Iran had not, before the June 2025 U.S. strikes, messaged the President threatening “sleeper-cell terror inside the U.S.” if he attacked. Iran went, in the space of a season, from terror sponsor to fixer-upper.

Read against the administration’s own stated aims, the memorandum is a catalog of undoings. The MOU is, in the most literal sense, a Memorandum of Undoing: nearly everything the administration said the war was for. Every maximal promise the war made, the memorandum either narrowed, deferred, or abandoned, with the Vice President now granting that Iran, “like any state,” retains a right to self-defense and need not give up the missile capability the President had vowed to raze. A Memorandum of Undoing is, after all, the easiest kind of document to undo. And it came undone in pieces:

First Undoing: The Nuclear File

The objective contracted until it fit the result.

“They will never have a nuclear weapon. I’ll say it again, they can never have a nuclear weapon.”, the President, February 28, opening the war.

“Most importantly, we have a deal that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”, the President, June 11, announcing the deal.

Set the two sentences side by side and you see the same words, but the first took the country to war and the second declared it won. The text supplies no complete mechanism to close the gap between them. It leaves the rules governing enrichment to a final agreement that does not yet exist and preserves the interim status quo, while the administration recites the original promise over it as though nothing had moved.

Its firmest operational commitment is the on-site downblending of enriched uranium under IAEA supervision, and experts argued that downblending on Iranian soil could be manipulated by the regime, because dilution without removal leaves the material in Tehran’s hands. Diluted stock can be enriched again; stock that stays in the country keeps the path back open in a way that removal never would, and low-enriched uranium already represents most of the technical work of reaching weapons grade. The nonproliferation analyst Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies urged the administration to reject precisely this arrangement, calling the request to downblend in-country “a deliberate gambit aimed at prolonging Tehran’s access to the material while minimizing concessions.” The memorandum does provide for IAEA-supervised downblending and a monitoring mechanism; what it leaves unresolved is most of the detail that would make either meaningful.

Much of what would turn the promise into a fact, the detailed timetable, permissible enrichment level, quantities, verification architecture, enforcement rules, and penalties, remains unwritten. The nuclear question the war was fought to settle was not settled. It was deferred to a sixty-day negotiation period and, in the meantime, announced in the exact words of the original threat.

Second Undoing: The Missiles

The goal shrank to fit what the bombing could reach.

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”, the President, February 28.

“Countries don’t give up the right of self-defense... we do expect that as part of the final deal, they are not going to be able to build the kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world.”, the Vice President, defending the ceasefire deal in June.

Razing Iran’s missile industry to the ground was the goal the President named in February. Curbing Iran’s ballistic missiles had been an American demand since the 2018 maximum pressure conditions, which called on Tehran to halt the development and launching of nuclear-capable missile systems and to end its proliferation of missiles to the proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the militias, that the war was meant to sever.

What the Vice President defended in June is far smaller, and the memorandum itself contains no missile clause at all. Vance’s position is a prospective negotiating stance, not a concession written into the agreement: that Iran, like any state, retains a right to self-defense, and that the deal aims only to stop it from building missiles that “can broadly threaten the entire world.” The February position razes Iran’s missile capability to the ground. The June position accepts the capability and haggles over range. The administration covered the distance in under four months without appearing to notice the target had moved.

Third Undoing: The Strait

Major leverage was suspended before the final bargain.

“The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.”, the President, late May.

“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it. It’s a beautiful thing.”, the President, April 8, on taking a cut of Iran’s toll.

The oil waivers come at the start of the sixty days, not the end, which means one of the largest pieces of pressure the U.S. held is suspended before the talks meant to settle the final nuclear bargain have even opened. Under the 2015 agreement, sanctions relief followed verification; Implementation Day came only after the IAEA confirmed Iran had finished the specified work. Here the relief precedes the bargain over the issue for which the war was ostensibly fought. As for the Strait of Hormuz, Iran guarantees no-charge passage for sixty days and no more; the text contains no durable toll-free guarantee, and the text provides no explicit post-sixty-day bar against Iran charging for or impeding passage again the moment it calculates it can absorb the consequences, the calculation it has just watched pay off.

A closure at Hormuz convulses global energy markets, but the physical flows principally serve Asian importers. The EIA estimates that 84 percent of the crude oil and condensate moving through the strait in 2024 went to Asian markets, against roughly 2 percent of total U.S. petroleum-liquids consumption. Washington poured in the lives and the money to reopen a waterway whose steady flow matters most to its chief rival.

The three hundred billion dollars is the most conspicuous promise in the deal and the one no one can verify. The text commits the U.S. and its regional partners to a plan of “at least” that sum but names no contributor and leaves the mechanism to a final deal that does not yet exist. What fills the vacuum is attribution without accountability: Axios traces the concept to Qatar, which now denies putting in money; Reuters, on a single anonymous source, reports more than half already committed, all private, all contingent on a deal not yet struck. Even the supposed backers will not vouch for it; the Saudi foreign minister, asked about the fund, said he had no details and that trust with Iran would have to be rebuilt first. A figure this large, unsupported by named investors or documented capital commitments, is not yet a fund. It is a number doing the work of one.

Fourth Undoing: The People

The people the war was supposed to be for were left out of it.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand... When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”, the President, February 28.

Of everything the war was sold as, this was the part that made it moral. The missiles and the enrichment were strategic; the promise to the Iranian people was the one that gave the war a conscience, the claim that this was a liberation and not merely a demolition. It was also the only war aim with nothing to bomb, nothing to verify, and no leverage attached, which made it the easiest thing in the agreement to abandon. So it was abandoned. The memorandum mentions the Iranian people nowhere. There is no amnesty in it, no protection, no clause on the detained or the condemned, nothing that reaches a single Iranian the war claimed to be fought for. What it contains instead is a mutual noninterference commitment, a pledge, in effect, to leave the regime to its own population.

During the bombing campaign, it was clear that the aims of the administration shifted, especially after the threats to destroy civilization, and even those who romanticized the bombs falling from the sky as liberation realized there was no real exit once the talks started. But it must have stung to see the regime get a reprieve that the people of Iran never had. The memorandum waives oil sanctions, commits Washington to make frozen assets usable, and promises the staged termination of the rest, and it must have added salt to the wound that the same document carries no protection for the people being rounded up by the thousands.

Fifth Undoing: The Proxies

Ambiguity became a victory narrative.

“We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”, the President, February 28.

“We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED!”, the President, June 19, two days after signing.

“Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it was not even comparable.”, Iran’s lead negotiator, that same week, on the same document.

Each side called the same text a win, which is predictable, but each read the Lebanon language to mean what it needed, and the memorandum was written loosely enough to let them. Iranian officials said they folded Lebanon in deliberately and read the clause as binding Israel, claiming there is no stability in the region “without ending the occupation and Israel’s compliance with international law.” Hezbollah read it the same way and thanked Tehran for compelling Israel to halt operations “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” Yet the clause only ends operations and affirms Lebanese sovereignty; it binds no one who did not sign. The group, which called the deal a “big victory”, is reading into the text a guarantee it does not contain. A clause everyone has already declared a victory is a clause no one has yet had to define.

Notice how Iran folded Hezbollah into a US-Iran agreement at all. Lebanon is a separate conflict, with separate parties, none of whom signed this memorandum. Yet Iran is treating it as a condition, and the parties themselves now speak of Lebanon as one of Iran’s fronts: Hezbollah addressed its thanks to Tehran for halting a war it described as part of the agreement to end the war against Iran. In doing so, Tehran sets the terms: implementation now answers to events in Lebanon that Tehran can invoke whenever it suits. And if Hezbollah, why not the rest? Nothing about the logic stops at one proxy. The same lever works for the Houthis, for the militias in Iraq, for any front Iran can point to on a given week.

The Red Sea showed it didn’t have to be this way. There, the U.S. and the Houthis reached their own understanding and walled it off: the deal covered attacks on each other and on U.S. vessels while explicitly excluding Israel, so the Houthis kept firing at Israel, Israel kept firing back, and none of it touched the US-Houthi arrangement, because Washington refused to let a third party’s war become its problem. Here it did the opposite. It signed an agreement Iran can hold hostage to a fight the U.S. is not even in.

The Administration’s Case for the Deal

The administration’s case had been stated before. Iran’s command structure is severely degraded; the energy crisis made every additional week of war more costly; the concessions are interim and reversible; and the memorandum buys an immediate end to the fighting in exchange for inspections and a sixty-day path to a final deal. On that reading the war was a hard bargain that bought de-escalation on terms that can still be tightened.

But the deal front-loads what is easy to give and defers what was hard to win, and that sequence is the whole problem. The relief arrives now; the questions the war was fought to settle, enrichment, missiles, proxies, the long-term status of the strait, are pushed into negotiations that may never produce a binding text and that Iran has every incentive to draw out. A waiver is easy to revoke on paper and far harder to reimpose once the markets have settled and the partners have moved on. What the U.S. handed over takes effect now. What it kept is a promise to argue later.

Critics have noted that this is not so different from the Obama deal. But the Obama deal was reached without a war, and this one was reached with one. That is the catch. A war is the most serious thing a country can choose to do, and the minimum it owes its own people, and the people on the other end of the bombing, is a stated objective against which its conduct and its result can be judged. This war never had one that held still long enough to be judged. What did it advance? What is more secure now than before it began? The memorandum is not an answer. It is a record of their absence, an objective dissolving under pressure just as the pressure that might have held it in place was lifted.

I have written before about maximum pressure and minimum strategy, and what we have now is the result. The terms may still improve at the table, but Iran keeps its nuclear program, its missiles, its government, and its grip on its own people, and beyond its borders, it has come away with more room to work, not less, a settlement that lets it consolidate its network and a new lever over Lebanon it can pull whenever it suits. The region is no safer than the day the bombing began.

War is a very costly way to end up where you started. Because the memorandum is nonbinding, much of it may not survive the sixty-day negotiating period. That fragility is precisely why its concessions must be recorded now. Set beside the abandoned promises on the nuclear file, the missiles, the regional proxies, and the Iranian people, the agreement shows what Washington was prepared to trade away not after achieving its objectives, but in place of them. This is more than a ledger of diplomatic compromise. It is an accounting of the void at the center of American foreign policy: not a shortage of power, but the absence of any durable idea of what that power is for. The administration went to war with absolute demands and returned with a memorandum of undoing, accepting the appearance of victory because it had no strategy by which victory could be measured. Washington can destroy, compel, and bargain; it cannot hold an objective still long enough to know whether it has won.

So what, in the end, did the war undo, if not its own purpose?

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There is a kind of war that the United States has fought many times in the Middle East. It is entered with conviction, prosecuted with force, and abandoned without ever deciding what it was for. The deal with Iran ends the latest of them, and Tehran, which has its own long memory, understands this better than Washington does. Given the power mismatch between the two, one might have expected Washington to dominate the narrative of the settlement. Instead, Tehran is the side calling the agreement a victory. But read the American press the same morning, and the deal was a president climbing out of a war he could not finish.

But the pressure to end the war and come to a ceasefire came from a host of forces that were not factored in at the beginning, pressures that neither side was able to fully control. For the average American citizen, it was the concern at the gas pump as oil prices kept climbing, and an administration that had entered loudly found itself answering to a public that wanted out, knowing an unfinished war could cost it at the midterms. For the Gulf, moreover, and for the mediators who suddenly held the room, Oman, Qatar, Pakistan, and the Saudis, it was the closed strait and the cost of a war on their doorstep that brought the urgency. None of this had much to do with Tehran’s conduct at the table, or with the nuclear question. The ceasefire carries a small set of requirements inside it and a far larger set outside, and it was the outside set that shaped how the war was fought and how it ended.

The Gulf was the clearest of those outside pressures. No state was hit harder than the UAE, its ports and energy infrastructure struck as Iran widened the war, and the calculation in Tehran was that the Gulf, facing economic shock, would press Washington to bring the campaign to an end. When the deal came, the UAE foreign ministry welcomed it carefully, emphasizing “the uninterrupted flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz,” and the rest of the Gulf and Turkey followed with their own statements.

The victory narrative for Tehran was built on top of that pressure. And although it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Iran and its so-called “Axis of Resistance” are claiming a win, what’s interesting is that they are using a Western scorecard to validate it. On June 14, the Tehran daily Hamshahri ran a front-page infographic announcing “the echo of Iran’s victory in the world,” and stacked a column of mastheads down the margin to prove it, Foreign Policy, CNN, The Atlantic, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, each clipped to a line conceding that Iran had come out ahead. For them, this was a great victory over the American order, certified by the American press. One front page reached further back, casting Trump as a Pharaoh who would meet his Moses.

Tehran’s Terms of Survival

Yet the loud triumphalism of the hardline press obscures something that could be easily missed: that Tehran wanted and needed this deal just as much as Washington needed an exit. The Islamic Republic has spent four decades bending toward whoever holds the leverage and calling the bend a triumph, and it has wanted off this particular road for some time. In fact, despite Tehran’s narrative of resilience, within a month of the war former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif published an extraordinary roadmap in Foreign Affairs, detailing a list of concessions to reach an agreement with the United States. Zarif explicitly urged the regime in Tehran to use its wartime resilience to “declare victory and make a deal,” trading nuclear limits for the lifting of the economic sanctions currently choking the state. The maneuver was legible at the time, and I argued as much then: the ideology bends to the leverage, and the bend gets renamed a triumph. The Zarif essay was that pattern set down in Foreign Affairs, an accommodation presented as strategy and circulated for an American readership. What is striking, looking at the memorandum now, is how closely it tracks the bargain Zarif sketched: the nuclear question deferred, the strait reopened, sanctions relief held out in exchange. The settlement Tehran is calling a victory is roughly the one its own diplomat proposed before the war was even over.

For all the insistence that the deal came on Iran’s terms, Zarif’s plea revealed the depth of Iranian exhaustion. It is hard to find a true hegemony in a deal sought by a state whose leader was killed, whose successor was wounded, and whose economy is in ruins. Turning bare survival into something worth crowing about is simply how the movement feeds itself and pacifies its domestic audience.

The illusion of a grand victory is being generated from Moscow as well, though for entirely different reasons. Writing in the Russian state outlet RIA Novosti just before the deal was finalized, the columnist Pyotr Akopov argued that Washington had ultimately defeated not Iran, but itself, noting that Trump could not force Tehran to surrender its enriched uranium without triggering a ground war the American public would never accept. To save face, Akopov wrote, Trump tried a last-minute “move with a knight,” demanding that Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan join the Abraham Accords so his retreat could be dressed up as an even more historic event. And while this is Moscow’s preferred and self-serving narrative, the shape of the critique is not far-fetched. The Trump administration entered the war with a long menu of objectives that kept narrowing and widening, drawing criticism and concern from the American public and from regional allies, and the confusion benefited Tehran.

The Gulf’s welcome, though, carried a worry the celebrations in Tehran did not. Months earlier, with the strait closed, the UAE’s envoy to the United Nations had named the danger directly: “The Strait of Hormuz cannot become a bargaining chip for Iran”. The deal that ended the war left it as exactly that.

From what is known so far, the memorandum is an interim arrangement rather than a settlement. It extends the ceasefire for sixty days, lifts the American naval blockade, and reopens the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, with passage to be regulated by Iran in coordination with Oman. Iran agrees again not to build a nuclear weapon and to freeze enrichment while a more detailed accord is negotiated, with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to be diluted inside the country under a future agreement. Roughly twenty-four billion dollars in frozen Iranian funds sits at the center of the bargain, and the two sides already describe its release differently, Tehran expecting half up front, Washington insisting on compliance first. The text has not been published, and the declared halt on “all fronts,” including Lebanon, is the line Tehran leans on hardest.

Lebanon is where Iran’s forward position is most exposed and most valuable, and keeping it inside the deal rather than carved out for separate handling means the protection, such as it is, travels with it. Written into the “all fronts” language, the arrangement stretches the deal’s cover over Hezbollah, so that a strike on Beirut becomes, on paper, a violation of an understanding with Washington. What that paper is worth is already disputed. Iran says the memorandum requires Israel to withdraw from Lebanon; its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has described the deal as a contest of two sides, the United States and Israel against Iran and Hezbollah, and called continued Israeli action in Lebanon a violation of it. American officials say it requires no such thing. The two sides are describing the deal differently in public, and Israeli strikes have continued. What Iran secured may be less the protection of Lebanon than the right to claim that protection was promised, a distinction the next sixty days will settle. Israel has its own set of internal considerations to account for, and it will act on those in Lebanon as it judges necessary, whatever the understanding says. The strikes that continued after the announcement of the ceasefire deal are a reminder of that. Hours before the memorandum was to be signed, Israel struck Beirut in response to a Hezbollah attack it called minor, delaying the signing and, by Trump’s own account to Axios, leaving him shocked and furious at an ally he could not control.

For Tehran, though, Lebanon was never just a forward position on a map. Jebel Amel, the Shia south of Lebanon, is one of the oldest homes of the faith that Iran governs in the name of, the ground that supplied many of the scholars Safavid Persia brought in to build its Shia order five centuries ago. Tehran sees the defense of Lebanon as the defense of a source, not a satellite, and the memorandum reads in the Iranian press as the recovery of something that was never up for negotiation.

Hezbollah had been losing ground in Lebanon before the deal arrived, and if anyone has been paying attention, it was feeling its grip loosen under pressure from the opposition inside the country. Days earlier, the Lebanese government reopened René Moawad Airport at Qlayaat in the north, dormant for decades, the country’s second civilian gateway and one beyond Hezbollah’s reach. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam insisted it was no replacement for Beirut’s airport, the kind of denial that names the thing it denies, and the opening landed as a direct challenge to Hezbollah’s hold on the country’s links to the outside world.

Which is why the timing of the June 8 Houthi strike on Israel should not be mistaken for Houthi solidarity with the Axis of Resistance. Strategy drove the decision. The move points to an effort to raise the cost of the pressure being applied to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis stayed out of the war through its heaviest months, including the worst of the strikes on Lebanon, and moved only when Hezbollah’s grip on the country began to slip. The front with the least to lose was sent to raise the cost for the fronts with the most.

Pressure on Washington

The pressure on Washington was domestic before it was anything else. By June, the war was over a hundred days old and unauthorized, and the costs had reached the kind of voter who does not follow foreign policy: five-dollar gas, six-dollar diesel, fertilizer a Kentucky farmer could not afford but understood was the price of a war in the Middle East.

On June 3, the House passed a war powers resolution to force an end to the fighting, 215 to 208, the first time such a measure had cleared either chamber since the war began, with four Republicans crossing the aisle to vote against their own president. Speaker Johnson had tried weeks earlier to bury an identical vote by sending the House home before it could be held; it came back anyway. The administration that had entered loudly was now being told, by its own party, that the war had to end.

From outside, the same message arrived in a different language. The Gulf was absorbing the costs of a war it neither controlled nor fully understood, left to bear the economic consequences of a strategy largely designed elsewhere. Meanwhile, Russia and China had pressed for a ceasefire from the first week, China’s foreign minister working the phones across Tehran, Tel Aviv, and the Gulf, both governments refusing to let new sanctions through. Even Iran’s friends wanted the war over, for reasons of their own.

In the general scheme of things, ending the war was perhaps unavoidable because the campaign had reached the point where Iran could not be broken any further, and the United States could not remain without the kind of open-ended ground commitment it had no appetite for. We had seen its shape before. A year ago, in the Red Sea, the United States bombed the Houthis for two months and then walked away from an adversary a fraction of Iran’s size, a ceasefire the Houthis had sought and then claimed as a victory. That was the rehearsal. This is the same thing at full scale, and from the first day, it was always going to end somewhere near here, because Iran’s whole theory of itself is that it outlasts powers stronger than it is, and the United States went in without an ending that would not prove the point.

It is tempting to call this mutual exhaustion and leave it there, two sides equally loud, equally spent, each with its own reasons to back out. But the two are not weak in the same way. Iran came out of the war badly hurt, its leader killed, its economy choking, its commanders living on target lists, and yet the degradation is not what the war is remembered for, because the Strait of Hormuz became the only thing anyone was watching, and a state that can still close the strait is not read as the loser, whatever it lost. The United States had enough force, but what it lacked was a purpose it could name to anyone, including itself.

Yet the most important consequence of the war may not be strategic at all. Some Iranians had hopes at the outset, when the regime had never looked weaker, and it was possible, for a season, to believe it would not survive the war. It survived, and worse, it prospered, because the war handed the mullahs exactly the external enemy a regime like this one needs to justify its grip at home, and the state that had entered at its lowest ebb emerged a Goliath, the tallest of all over its own people. And although I do not want to sound like a broken record, had anyone been paying attention, the pattern was already there to see in the Iran-backed Houthis, who turned their weapons inward the moment the United States walked away from the Red Sea, sentencing seventeen Yemenis to death for spying, raiding UN offices, and labeling an ever-widening circle of their own population American or Israeli agents, eliminating the threat from within so that no revolution could take hold while the threat from without was real. That is the lesson Tehran has now absorbed, that the danger can converge from outside and inside at once, and the cost of any reckoning has been set, deliberately, very high for everyone who might attempt one.

The Trump administration came to this war as Washington comes to most things in the region, certain of its power and vague about its purpose. But neither the certainty nor the vagueness is what ended it. The same pressures that forced the ceasefire are still in the room: the strait that can be closed again, the markets that will climb again, the allies whose patience is already spent. The memorandum buys sixty days. The pressures that made it necessary will still be there when the sixty days are up.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

The Mufti Shamsaddin Sharafaddin is increasingly stepping into the political-spokesman role, and the movement is building a clerical authority structure to carry it.

Week in Brief

The Mufti Shamsaddin Sharafaddin’s Friday May 1 sermon framed the United States as at its weakest point and named “sharp disagreements among its officials” as evidence of the “end and fall of the American tyrant.” The Mufti is increasingly stepping into the political-spokesman role from the Friday minbar, and the movement is building a clerical authority structure to support it. Acting Prime Minister Mohammed Muftah was visible only inside governance items on Information Ministry coordination and Civil Service merger procedures on May 3, both of which could be viewed as routine.

Mohammed Al-Fareh, member of the Houthi Political Bureau was posting prolifically on X this week. His May 3 post on Saudi intelligence “continuing to recruit cells” reframed the alleged ongoing Saudi-Houthi de-escalation as cover for war by other means, which signals a coordinated campaign in Houthi media to pressure Saudi Arabia. Hasan Sharafaddin, former Minister of State during the National Dialogue phase, amplified Hezbollah and circulated archival material from Mohammed Ali al-Houthi to perform institutional continuity without requiring any new senior statement. Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Abu-Ras issued a statement attacking the Saudi government for receiving “Zionist teams” while Gaza burned.

Hormuz set the agenda. The Houthi Foreign Ministry issued an April 28-29 statement backing Iranian measures in the Strait, calling U.S. action “piracy,” and stating explicitly that Yemen “is not neutral regarding attacks on Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine.” That single line is the doctrinal anchor for everything that followed. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called the U.S. blockade an “extension of military operations against Iran.” Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said Iranian management of Hormuz was the path to a future “independent of Washington.” A message attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei and broadcast by official Iranian media said “foreign actors” have no place in the Gulf “except in the depths of its waters.” Each line appeared on Houthi outlets within hours. By Tuesday evening May 5, IRGC political deputy Yadollah Javani was published in English on the wire saying Trump could not restore the prewar political and military situation, and Iran would now require prior authorization for non-hostile passage through Hormuz.

The UAE became the week’s named target. On May 4, the Emirati defense ministry reported four cruise missiles from Iran, three intercepted, and a fire at the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone. Iranian military spokesman Ibrahim Dhu al-Fiqari said the strikes followed confirmation of Emirati participation in the war on Iran. By May 5, Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters denied launching strikes on the UAE while warning that any Emirati move against Iranian islands would draw a “crushing response.” Both versions appeared on the same Houthi outlets within twenty-four hours without analytical comment. A long-form piece on May 5 titled “How the UAE Participated in the Aggression on Iran” assembled a chronology of Emirati basing, logistics, and pre-war positioning.

Hormuz and the Iranian frame

IRGC-driven content showed up on Houthi outlets often from the same Tehran-side source: Press TV warnings of "unprecedented military action," Al-Mayadeen attributions for the IRGC, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei's statement that the U.S. has no legal basis for war under self-defense framing, and the alleged Mojtaba Khamenei message that several Houthi outlets treated as canonical despite the attribution being unconfirmed. The fidelity is tight enough to read as co-authorship. Amplifying the Mojtaba message functioned as a test balloon to assess Gulf reaction to a doctrine that displaces U.S. security architecture with Iranian regional management.

The Tanuma campaign

The most coordinated multi-platform campaign this week targeted Saudi Arabia, and the choice of historical hook is the strangest move the movement has made this quarter. The Tanuma incident, dated to 1923, in which Saudi forces under what would later become the modern Saudi state are alleged to have killed and looted Yemeni pilgrims en route to Hajj, is not a household event in Yemeni public memory. It predates the existence of the Yemeni state in its current form. It predates the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The “massacre” framing is itself contested in available historical sources, with casualty estimates varying widely and even the basic course of events disputed. The Houthis pulled this from the deep historical archive and elevated it cross-platform, in op-eds, rallies, and influencer cards, on consecutive days.

This is memory politics rather than grievance politics. The campaign is not designed to remind Yemenis of something they remember. It is designed to give them something to remember. The campaign builds an identity by selecting a past, then claiming it. By rooting the current Houthi-Saudi confrontation in 1923 rather than in 2015, the movement argues that what looks like an eleven-year war is actually a hundred-year project, and that what looks like proxy conflict is actually civilizational defense. Wahhabism becomes the original sin, not the recent agitator. The Saudi state becomes a foreign instrument, not a regional power.

More on this issue was covered in political op-eds such as “The Bad Neighbor and the Black File” published on May 5 which opened the Tanuma chronology and continued through “the Saudi aggression against Yemen and the violation of Yemeni sovereignty in 1934 AD.” “Tanouma: The Deep Wound and the Persistent Hatred” on May 5 connected the 1923 event to the 2015 war and what it described as a continuing siege. “A Century of Saudi Hatred Toward Yemen” on May 4 built the genealogy of “Wahhabi exclusionary ideology” as the British colonial instrument that produced the Saudi state. “Fingerprints of Aggression” variants appeared alongside.

The function of this pressure on Saudi is leverage. As earlier issues of this lane have noted, the Houthi-Saudi back-channel remains active in the background even when not visible in dated headlines. The Tanuma file is positioning for that track. By framing eleven years of war as the latest expression of a century-old Saudi project against Yemen, the campaign argues that current grievances cannot be resolved through ceasefire arrangements alone. They require compensation. Mohammed Al-Fareh’s framing of recent “de-escalation” as cover for continued Saudi intelligence activity sits inside the same posture. So does Abu-Ras’s late-May 4 statement excoriating Riyadh for receiving “Zionist teams.” The deputy foreign minister has not normally been the figure deployed for hard-edged Saudi attacks. His use this week, paired with the Mufti’s Friday tone-setting and the editorial saturation, is the active negotiating posture made public.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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…

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