Do you really know who the Houthis are?
The Yemen conflict is often misleadingly portrayed as a Sunni-Shia war, with Saudi Arabia supposedly fighting the Shia Houthis. History tells a far more complicated story.
In 1962, Imam Muhammad al-Badr, the last Zaydi Imam of Yemen was overthrown, triggering the North Yemen Civil War.
Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists, while Egypt backed the republican forces. The Imamate eventually ended in 1970.
In the 1990s, the Houthi movement emerged as a Zaydi revivalist movement. Its relationship with President Ali Abdullah Saleh himself a Zaydi later deteriorated, leading to the first Houthi insurgency in 2004.
After several rounds of fighting, the Houthis seized Sana’a in 2014 and eventually challenged Yemen’s internationally recognised government.
In 2015, President Hadi formally requested military assistance, after which Saudi Arabia led a coalition intervention in support of Yemen’s recognised government.
So this is not simply a Sunni Shia war, nor a Saudi Yemeni war. It is rooted in Yemen’s own political, historical and civil conflict.
So the fact is Saudi Arabia once supported Yemen’s Zaydi Imam against the republicans and decades later, it intervened against the Zaydi Houthi movement on the demand of legitimate Government of the Yemen .
Anyone discussing Yemen without understanding this timeline risks reducing a deeply complex conflict to a misleading sectarian narrative.