■If everyone claims to be fighting for Yemen, why does Yemen itself keep losing?■
There is something deeply unsettling about a country being attacked from within its own borders.
The missiles may carry the name of a faction. The drones may belong to an armed movement. The targets may be controlled by an opposing authority. But beneath all the maps, military communiqués and geopolitical calculations lie a much simpler tragedy: Yemen is being fought over while Yemenis continues to pay the price.
And that brings us to the question that refuses to disappear:
Who are the Houthis—and Why does a Yemeni movement keep attacking targets inside Yemen?
The answer begins with a distinction that modern geopolitics often erases.
The Houthis emerged from Yemen’s own Zaydi religious and political environment. Zaydism itself is far older than the contemporary Houthi movement and has been part of Yemen’s history for more than a thousand years. Its intellectual lineage reaches back to Imam Zayd ibn Ali, whose revolt against Umayyad authority became a defining reference point for a tradition that placed knowledge, moral courage, and resistance to injustice at the heart of leadership.
Classical Zaydi thought did not conceive the Imam simply as an untouchable or infallible figure. Leadership carried responsibility. Knowledge mattered; piety mattered; justice mattered. An individual claiming authority was expected to possess the intellectual and moral qualifications worthy of that responsibility. Authority was, therefore, not merely a privilege to be inherited; it was a trust to be justified.
Zaydism eventually found its strongest and most enduring home in northern Yemen, where a Zaydi Imamate was established in the ninth century. For centuries, Zaydi Imams ruled or exercised considerable authority over large portions of Yemen. The tradition became woven into Yemeni society, tribal structures, and religious scholarship.
That history matters because Zaydism should not casually be treated as another name for Twelver Shi’ism, nor should Yemen’s ancient Zaydi heritage automatically be reduced to modern Iranian ideology. Zaydism developed its own theological and jurisprudential tradition and became embedded in Yemen long before today’s regional power struggles.
And here lies the first great question.
Where does an ancient religious tradition end and a modern geopolitical movement begin?
For the answer, we must look beyond the guns.
The Yemen of today is not merely the Yemen of armed factions. Somewhere beneath the thunder of missiles lies another Yemen—a Yemen almost forgotten by the men who claim to fight in its name.
There is the Yemen of the ordinary people: the farmer waiting for rain, the fisherman watching the Red Sea, the mother trying to feed her children, the shopkeeper opening his shutter each morning, the student dreaming of a profession, and the old man who remembers a Yemen before its streets became front lines.
They are the overwhelming human majority—yet they possess almost none of the weapons with which Yemen is being fought over.
Their history did not begin with the Houthis.
A Yemeni child is not a missile.
A Yemeni mother is not a geopolitical proxy.
A Yemeni fisherman is not an extension of Tehran, Riyadh, Washington or any other capital.
A civilian who wants bread, electricity, education and security has no obligation to become a soldier in somebody else’s regional calculation.
And perhaps this is where the ghost of Ismail Safavi-I enters our story—not as a literal return of the Safavid Empire, and certainly not as proof that today’s Houthis are simply Safavid soldiers in modern clothing, but as a question about the long historical shadow of religion, state power and Persian regional influence.
Five centuries ago, Shah Ismail I transformed Persia by establishing the Safavid state and making Twelver Shi’ism its state religion. Modern Iran belongs to a very different historical age, and the Houthis belong to Yemen’s indigenous Zaydi tradition. The connection therefore cannot honestly be reduced to a straight historical line.
Yet history sometimes leaves shadows rather than straight lines.
The question is whether those shadows can cross mountains, seas, sectarian boundaries and centuries—and whether modern power can recruit ancient identities for contemporary strategic purposes.
This distinction is essential.
Traditional Zaydi Yemen is one thing.
The contemporary Houthi movement is another.
Iran’s regional strategy is a third.
To merge all three into one identity would be historically careless.
But to pretend that modern regional alliances have nothing to do with Yemen’s transformation would be equally careless.
And somewhere between these two extremes stands the Yemeni civilian.
The old Zaydi tradition contained a powerful moral proposition: leadership without knowledge and righteousness is unworthy of authority. Resistance to oppression was not supposed to be an excuse for oppression; it was supposed to be an obligation against it.
That creates an uncomfortable question for our own age:
What happens when the language of resistance itself becomes part of a new machinery of war?
If resistance is invoked in the name of justice, who protects the innocent when resistance produces another generation of victims?
If missiles are fired in the name of Yemen, who speaks for the Yemenis beneath them?
If every faction claims to be defending the nation, why does the nation itself remain broken?
Perhaps the answer lies in returning to the oldest moral vocabulary.
The Qur’an does not present unity as a slogan. It commands believers to hold firmly together and not become divided:
“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not be divided.”
— Qur’an, 3:103
This is not a command to erase every difference. It is a command not to allow difference to become destruction.
The Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] placed extraordinary emphasis upon mercy, brotherhood and responsibility toward others. The strength of a believing community was never intended to be measured merely by the number of weapons it possessed, but by the quality of the human beings it produced.
And here the old question returns in another form:
Can Muslims disagree without becoming enemies?
The answer must be yes.
Sunni and Shia, Zaydi and Twelver, Arab and non-Arab, scholar and statesman, ruler and citizen—these distinctions need not become permanent walls. They become dangerous when political power teaches human beings to hate one another through them.
The Qur’an gives us the light.
The Prophetic tradition gives us the character.
History gives us the warning.
Philosophy gives us the mirror.
And somewhere on a quiet road, perhaps, a wandering Darvesh hears the argument and rings the little bells sewn into his robe.
BāBā Tal—the old bell-man—might lean toward me and whisper:
“Bacha… knowledge flows beneath the earth long before it becomes a spring. Do not mistake the noise above the ground for the whole river.”
Then he would probably fall silent.
Because perhaps Yemen needs silence of a different kind—not the silence of surrender, but the silence in which ordinary people can finally be heard.
The world has spent years asking who controls Yemen.
Perhaps it should ask something more fundamental:
Who speaks for the Yemenis who want only to live in Yemen?
Who speaks for the fisherman?
Who speaks for the farmer?
Who speaks for the mother?
Who speaks for the child?
Who speaks for the millions who have no militia, no missile, no drone and no foreign sponsor?
They are Yemen.
And if they are Yemen, then any political project that destroys them cannot honestly claim to have saved Yemen.
This is where the moral responsibility of the wider Muslim world begins.
Not with another slogan.
Not with another sectarian accusation.
Not with another proxy war.
But with the courage to say that the blood of a Yemeni civilian is neither Sunni blood nor Shia blood nor Zaydi blood nor Iranian blood nor Saudi blood.
It is human blood.
And perhaps this is where the words from my old unpublished work return with renewed meaning:
O lovers of Ibn Abdullah ﷺ—Unite.
Unite not around domination.
Unite not around kingship.
Unite not around the ambitions of competing capitals.
Unite around truth.
Unite around justice.
Unite around knowledge.
Unite around mercy.
Unite around the simple proposition that no Muslim should be required to destroy another Muslim in order to prove his faith.
The differences between schools of thought are real. History must not be falsified to pretend otherwise. But disagreement does not require hatred, and jurisprudential differences do not require civilisational suicide.
The greatest strength of the Ummah may not lie in making everyone think alike.
It may lie in teaching different hearts to live justly together.
And poor Foxy?
She would probably have nothing sophisticated to say.
She would simply sit quietly at the roadside, watching another convoy pass, while the great men of the world continued discussing strategy.
Perhaps she would remind me of the most inconvenient truth of all:
The people who suffer from war rarely sit at the table where war is decided.
So let us ask the question one final time.
If the Houthis say they are fighting for Yemen, if their opponents say they are fighting for Yemen, if regional powers say they are defending their interests, and if every capital has its own explanation—
WHO IS ANSWERABLE TO THE YEMENI PEOPLE?
That is the question the missile can not answer.
That is the question the drone can not answer.
That is the question history will eventually ask of everyone.
And perhaps, when the smoke finally clears, Yemen will not need another conqueror.
It will need its own people back.
□■□■POETEARS■□■□
[ coined by T. Hejazi-where tears become poetry and poetry becomes tears]
The mountain keeps the secrets that the missiles can not tell,
The sea remembers every tear that fell.
When power speaks of victory and leaves the people scarred,
The quiet voice of Yemen asks: Who will answer for the yard?
Also Read: THE WORLD NEEDS PAKISTAN — BUT DOES PAKISTAN KNOW IT?
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