Yemen : what the war has done to the State and the society
Interview with Jules Grange Gastinel, PhD candidate, CNRS.
Interview conducted by Victor Jardin on 26 October 2026. Quotations have been translated from French and lightly edited for the written format.
Since September, Yemen has slid back into open war, and Houthi missiles are now reaching Riyadh. Yet for Jules Grange Gastinel, a CNRS doctoral researcher who specialises in the movement, the real story lies elsewhere: in a power that governs, negotiates and thinks like a state, and in a society that is paying the price.
On 10 October 2026, a Houthi missile struck King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing at least twelve people and injuring more than 300. A few days later, the kingdom postponed the Future Investment Initiative, the showcase of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030. These strikes are no isolated episode. They mark a turning point: for the first time since the 2022 truce, Yemen's war has reached the heart of Saudi Arabia.
Understanding this escalation requires a look back at the movement's trajectory. The Houthis, who call themselves Ansar Allah, entered Sanaa in September 2014. In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition intervened to restore the internationally recognised government. With no military victory in sight, a truce took hold in 2022. The Gaza war then gave the movement a new regional stage, with its blockade of the Red Sea in 2023-2024. Finally, in the summer of 2026, hostilities resumed: the Houthis seized Mokha and closed in on the Bab el-Mandeb strait.
International debate has focused on the Red Sea, Riyadh and Tehran. In his interview with Al Mawja, Jules Grange Gastinel, a doctoral researcher at the CNRS (IREMAM, CEDEJ) whose thesis examines the Houthis "put to the test of the state", invites us to look elsewhere.
What does the current sequence reveal about the nature of Houthi power, and about what the war has done to Yemeni society?
Daily report on the "US-Saudi-Emirati crimes and agressions " against Yemen from Saba.ye, the Houthi controlled press agency.
The Houthi offensive : a shift that is domestic rather than maritime
The capture of Mokha does not fundamentally change the game in the Red Sea. As the Houthis closed in on Bab el-Mandeb, insurers and foreign ministries warned of a possible stranglehold on global trade. For Jules Grange Gastinel, this was "a false reaction" that "misses a whole part of the analysis". The movement already controlled access to the Red Sea through the northern coastline and the port of Hodeidah, "far more significant" than Mokha. In 2023-2024, it had already shown it could block the Red Sea "whenever it wants".
The Houthis even went out of their way to reassure. Their representatives appeared on Sky News and Al Jazeera to insist that they would only target Saudi ships, since their conflict is "with Saudi Arabia, not with the rest of the world". The researcher sees this as a strategy to make the Sanaa state look respectable and credible.
The real turning point is domestic. Two camps face each other. On one side, the Houthis hold the state apparatus in Sanaa and militarily control 30 to 40% of the territory. On the other, the internationally recognised government, backed by Riyadh, brings together "a myriad of disparate actors" whose only common ground is their opposition to what they call the 2014 coup. Yet this second camp "has lost a lot of ground", militarily but also in terms of security, politics and the economy. Above all, it is losing legitimacy, as part of its elite lives in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi or Muscat. "We meet them outside Yemen," the researcher notes, "while the Houthis truly hold the ground."
What the Houthis want : to be treated as a State
Houthi demands go well beyond lifting the blockade. What do the Houthis want? This question, Jules Grange Gastinel argues, is "not asked enough by the international press". A few days before the interview, he put it in Muscat to the head of their negotiating delegation, Mohammed Abdelsalam. Four demands emerge. First, an end to "external aggression" and to the blockade Saudi Arabia has imposed since March 2015. Second, an end to American and Western interventions across the Middle East, from Iran to Lebanon and Iraq. Third, a domestic political settlement able to reunify a country split between Sanaa and Aden. Fourth, and above all, recognition of the facts on the ground: "They have governed the state in the North for twelve years without being recognised as a legitimate power," the researcher explains. They now want to speak to the international community "as a state, and no longer as a power others describe as rebels, insurgents or even a militia".
This quest for recognition sheds light on their paradoxical relationship with Washington. Since Donald Trump's return in 2025, the United States has once again designated Ansar Allah a terrorist organisation. The researcher recalls the retort of a Houthi official in Cairo: if they are terrorists, then so is the American administration. Neither side recognises the other. And yet they negotiated in Muscat this autumn, and both sides publicly said so. For the Houthis, the stakes are clear: to stop being a rebel actor "that should be grateful to be invited to the negotiating table".
The movement has mastered the codes of state diplomacy. When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi floated support for Saudi operations, the speaker of the Sanaa parliament, Yahya al-Raie, sent an official telegram to his counterpart in Cairo urging him to oppose it. This parliament, elected in the last legislative elections of 2003, is not recognised by the international community, which regards Sultan al-Barakani, aligned with the recognised government, as its legitimate speaker. When the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar later called for an end to all wars, Mohammed Abdelsalam immediately welcomed the statement. "They are entirely capable of adapting to diplomatic language," Jules Grange Gastinel concludes.
Logo of the Supreme Political Council, the extraconstitutional rival executive established in 2016 in Sanaa by the Houthis. Wikimedia Commons.
Riyadh weakened, Abu Dhabi on the sidelines: the anti-Houthi coalition under strain
Saudi Arabia is suffering a setback that is first and foremost symbolic. The country is presented as having the largest army in the Middle East, extensively modernised with Western equipment. Being put on the defensive by an actor long portrayed as "a band of mountain rebels" is a heavy blow. The Houthis are nothing of the sort, the researcher stresses. The war also undermines Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030, whose economic ambitions require stability. Riyadh has spent years trying to get out of what it sees as a quagmire. Yet neither the military victory it sought in 2015, nor the 2022 truce, nor regional mediation has delivered.
The Houthi success, for its part, is above all a matter of narrative. The movement frames its strikes on Saudi airports, including against civilians, as a response to years of bombing of Yemeni civilians, under the slogan "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". This narrative has its limits, however. International opinion is "deeply shocked", and the movement's few English-speaking spokespeople struggle to defend attacks that are not aimed solely at military targets.
The rapprochement between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi does not erase their differences over Yemen. Despite the Saudi defence minister's visit to the Emirates, the relationship remains "extremely complicated". Between December 2025 and January 2026, the Southern Transitional Council (STC), backed by Abu Dhabi yet a member of the Presidential Leadership Council, seized territory vital to the Saudi camp and then declared the South's independence. Riyadh retook it within days, and the STC's leader, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, fled to Abu Dhabi. Since then, Yemeni elites have concluded that the Emirates are out of the game. The researcher is more cautious: their return within a year or two cannot be ruled out, especially since secessionist aspirations in the South did not disappear with military defeat. In reality, the only genuine point of convergence between the STC and Rashad al-Alimi's Presidential Leadership Council remains their opposition to the Houthis.
Signature of the Riyad agreement in 2019 with the UAE President, the Saudi crown prince and the Yemeni internationally recognised president. Wikimedia Commons.
Governing at war : how the Houthi state was built
This is the core of Jules Grange Gastinel's research: how an armed movement born in the mountains of Saada seized the state apparatus and transformed it from within, without destroying it.
The takeover of the state happened in stages. After the Houthis entered Sanaa in September 2014, a government of national unity lasted a few months. The constitutional declaration of February 2015, the house arrest of President Hadi and the march on Aden triggered the Saudi intervention and the partition of the country. Much of Ali Abdullah Saleh's former elite then chose to stay and govern alongside the Houthis, within a Supreme Political Council that formally remained an institution of the Republic. This marriage of convenience between two opposing projects ended in December 2017 with Saleh's assassination, followed by a purge in 2018.
Loyalists of the movement then took over the state apparatus. The Houthis put into practice what they had learned from this bureaucracy. The mushrifs, "supervisors" placed in government departments, rose through the ranks and gained official posts. The movement's political bureau acquired an administrative role. After the Israeli strike of August 2025 that decimated the government, veteran cadres took over: the acting foreign minister, Abdelwahid Abu Ras, is a former intelligence officer who was already active during the Saada wars. The phenomenon has not disappeared; it has been institutionalised. At the same time, the movement co-opts tribal leaders, often young and of modest rank to ensure their loyalty, and has reformed the judiciary, religious doctrine and education. All are instruments serving a regime with "very authoritarian tendencies".
The war economy rests on paradoxes. There is no official budget. The country has two central banks, in Sanaa and in Aden, and a single currency with two exchange rates: the rial is stronger in the North than in the South. Major companies keep their headquarters in Sanaa while operating across the rest of the country, including in the oil-producing areas. Civil servants are said to earn around sixteen times less than before the war, an estimate the researcher urges readers to treat with caution. Two resources keep the regime afloat: remittances from the diaspora, particularly in the United States and the Gulf, and the diversion of humanitarian aid, on which 80% of the population depends.
Houthi power largely governs with other people's money. Aid is channelled through a body now run on security lines and obsessed with hunting down spies. It is headed by Ahmed Hamed, chief of staff to the president of the Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashat, and a close associate of the leader whom the researcher describes as the real decision-maker. Inspections of NGO offices lead to seized equipment and closer surveillance, and dozens of local UN staff are in detention. Yet it is often these same NGOs that rebuild the roads, schools and hospitals destroyed by the bombing. The minister then comes to cut the ribbon in front of the logo of the Republic, with the NGO's logo placed "just next to it". The scene sums up the ambivalence of a state that draws legitimacy from public policies it does not fund.
200 Yemeni rials yéménites issued in a Houthi-controlled area. Wikimedia commons, 2025.
A society under a lead blanket
The Houthi project aims to shape an entire generation around "resistance". Measuring genuine public support remains almost impossible, given how hard it is to conduct research in the North. Yet testimonies from child soldiers and from families who pulled their children out of "summer centres" point to a clear trend. Some families left Houthi-held areas less to escape poverty than out of fear that their children, aged six, seven or eight, would be enrolled in schools that have become training centres. Since 2016-2017, school reform has rewritten the curriculum and trained a new generation of teachers, despite resistance from some teachers and head teachers. Children learn to handle weapons early, trample on Israeli, Saudi and American flags, and take part in ceremonies glorifying the movement's martyred founder, Hussein al-Houthi, and his brother Abdul-Malik, its current leader. The researcher likens them to scenes from Pyongyang. The goal is "socialisation at every moment", comparable to what Catherine Le Thomas has studied in Hezbollah's scouting movement.
The South is not spared: new textbooks, training camps and child soldiers are appearing there too, though to a lesser extent. The long-term risk is a split between "two peoples who no longer speak to each other", two generations trained to fight each other for years, even decades.
Civilians are the war's first victims. On the Tihama coast today, as since 2015, they are the ones paying the price. According to figures cited by Laurent Bonnefoy in Orient XXI, the conflict has caused at least 300,000 to 400,000 direct and indirect deaths, not counting lost births or mass displacement. Marib, which had a few hundred thousand inhabitants before the war, is now said to host more than a million. The North lives under generalised surveillance, with political prisons and a rhetoric of espionage that exposes anyone to arbitrary arrest. The South suffers chronic insecurity, marked by extortion and violence by armed forces. Everywhere, the health system is broken, infant mortality is at record levels and literacy is falling. Some teachers have even joined the army to earn a salary and feed their families.
Meanwhile, part of the political class continues to live, "to use a term that will be controversial, in opulence". Some Yemenis denounce a "Republic of Hotels": elites who govern from Riyadh, Abu Dhabi or Muscat, no longer aware of what a population facing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises is going through. Even officials from Sanaa travel to Cairo or Jordan for surgery.
Ending the war : a peace that nobody wants ?
Any way out of the war first runs up against the fragmentation of the actors. Yemeni forces readily talk of an "intra-Yemeni" dialogue, but bringing them together is already a challenge: apart from Muscat, the researcher knows of no place where all of them can meet. The Houthis call on the elites to return to Sanaa for a "civil concord" modelled on Algeria after its civil war. The researcher considers this prospect "realistic only from very, very far away", so opposed are the political projects.
Even a peace agreement would leave a daunting question open: what to do, the day after, with institutions that have been duplicated and transformed by twelve years of war? Should the central banks, parliament and intelligence services be reunified? Should the Houthis' revolutionary bodies and the leader's office be abolished? Should Abdul-Malik al-Houthi keep his position above the institutions? For the Republic in the North, the researcher stresses, is no longer quite the one that existed before 2014. As for elections, they would settle nothing in a country divided along security, economic and political lines, where every camp already claims an absolute majority. A further paradox: apart from the southern secessionists, everyone says they are committed to the country's unity.
Above all, "few actors have an interest in peace", including inside Yemen. Part of the exiled elite continues to enjoy excellent living conditions. As for the Houthis, they remain a movement "born in war, through war, for war". Their legitimacy has only ever wavered in times of respite. In September 2023, after the truce, large demonstrations took place in Sanaa to mark the anniversary of the Republic. Two weeks later, 7 October gave them a new enemy, Israel, and a new reason to "act as a state through war".
In conclusion, the current escalation is not merely a sign of Houthi military power. It reveals a power that has learned to govern, negotiate and build its legitimacy through war, facing a fragmented opposing camp and regional sponsors looking for a way out. One question remains, the one that closed the interview and that may well decide Yemen's future: could the Houthis run the state they have built in any context other than a headlong rush into war?