Washington considers designating Houthis as terrorist group

Voices have recently risen in Washington for the White House to reclassify the Houthi militia in Yemen as a terrorist group, and these voices have found support from representatives and Republican leaders such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, a member of the Armed Forces Committee in the House of Representatives, who stressed that the decision to cancel the designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group was a mistake from the beginning and that the administration of President Joe Biden needs to reverse course, acknowledge reality and submit to conclusive evidence.

The Biden administration removed the Houthis from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations in February 2021, reversing the decision of the administration of former President Donald Trump, but the Houthis made their pledge to storm the US embassy in Yemen in November 2021 and continued to launch missiles at Saudi Arabia and recently Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

American awakening

In a move that followed the missile and drone attacks on Abu Dhabi, President Biden announced that his administration is considering reclassifying the Houthi militia as an international terrorist organization.

It is worth noting that the removal of the Houthis from the US terrorism list nearly a year ago did not lead to the strengthening of the efforts of the United Nations, nor the resumption of peace talks in Yemen, nor the end of what the United Nations describes as the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. On the contrary, removing the militia from the terrorist list contributed to the development of its aggressive behavior, and the rate of strikes increased to the point that it targeted civilians in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as happened at Abha and Jazan airports, and recently in Abu Dhabi.

The decision to include the Houthis on the terrorist list, which was approved at the end of Trump’s term, was based on many facts, including that the two parties from which the Houthi militia came, namely the Revolutionary Guards in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are classified as terrorist groups, so it would be illogical that the Houthis would be any different when emanating from them, as well as deliberately bombing hospitals, forcibly recruiting children and deploying them in battles, trying to kill all members of the internationally recognized Yemeni government, bombing civilian airports and oil refineries, targeting camps for displaced people with ballistic missiles, homes and civilian objects, and planting mines that exceeded two million without providing any maps of them, which are all terrorist acts par excellence, and whoever carries them out is classified as a terrorist.

Accordingly, the criticism directed at the Biden administration increased because of the soft language that enticed the militia and made it raise the level of strikes on civilians in light of the American demands for Tehran to sign a new nuclear agreement, with fears that Tehran would be able in the short or medium term to turn into a nuclear power, which is something that many politicians in Washington are now aware of today.