Leaders of the Houthi terrorist organization of Yemen reportedly visited Moscow on Thursday, seeking support as they continue a campaign to disrupt global shipping by bombing commercial ships attempting to transit the Red Sea.
Neither the Russian government nor the leadership of the Houthi terror organization, formally referred to as Ansarallah, offered many details on the nature of their discussions. A top Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdel Salam, reportedly claimed that his delegation had met with Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to discuss pressuring America to stop supporting Israel’s self-defense operations against the Sunni terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza.
Hamas executed an invasion and terrorist siege of unprecedented magnitude against Israel on October 7, 2023, rampaging through residential communities and engaging in gang rape, infanticide, mass torture, abduction, and desecration of corpses. Many of the participating terrorists filmed themselves killing, beating, torturing, and desecrating the corpses of their victims, some uploading the videos to social media pages. An estimated 130 victims, including at least one infant, remain abducted in jihadist custody, presumed to be in Hamas-controlled Gaza.
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Ansarallah is a Shiite terrorist organization but shares a genocidal jihadist ideology and patrons in Tehran with Hamas. In response to Israel launching a self-defense operation in Gaza, the Houthis vowed to disrupt international shipping. Houthi leaders have committed to long-term shipping disruptions and insist that they will only attack ships with some relationship to Israel, but they have attacked ships with seemingly no ties to Israel, including some flying the flags of Norway and the Bahamas, among others. The attacks have forced global shipping to divert away from the Red Sea and previously busy Suez Canal around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
The government of leftist President Joe Biden, coordinating with the British government, has engaged in several airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. The airstrikes have had no significant effect on the Houthi Red Sea piracy campaign; Biden admitted they are doing nothing to stop the attacks but committed to continuing the bombing.
A Royal Air Force (RAF) Typhoon aircraft takes off from RAF Akrotiri to join the U.S.-led coalition to conduct air strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels on January 11, 2024, in Akrotiri, Cyprus. (MoD Crown Copyright via Getty Images)
Abdel Salam, the Houthi spokesman, was reportedly seeking Russian support against both the Western airstrikes and the Israeli campaign in Gaza, urging Moscow to advocate for America to “stop the aggression on the Gaza Strip and deliver humanitarian assistance there rather than militarise the Red Sea.”
The spokesman added that the Houthis believed the meeting would help address “the need to increase efforts to pressure” America and Israel.
The Russian government was among the first to condemn the Biden airstrikes while offering no meaningful criticism of the Houthi attacks on random ships.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared on January 12, in the aftermath of the first strikes, that they showed a “total disregard for international law in the name of escalating the situation in the region for their own destructive purposes.” The Foreign Ministry branded the airstrikes an “Anglo-Saxon perversion” in a formal statement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered a modest critique of the Houthis while similarly railing against the American and British counterstrikes, suggesting the Houthis should “abandon the practice.”
At the United Nations, the Russian representatives at the Security Council refused to vote in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the Houthi attacks. Before the vote, the Russians attempted to water down the text of the resolution to render it toothless. The resolution passed anyway, a modest victory for the free world as Russia has veto power on the council and chose not to exercise it.
The Houthis responded to Russia’s support by issuing public assurances that Russian ships — and those flying Chinese flags — were safe from their attacks.
Yemen’s Houthi fighters take over the Galaxy Leader Cargo in the Red Sea on November 20, 2023. (Houthi Movement via Getty Images)
“As for all other countries, including Russia and China, their shipping in the region is not threatened,” Houthi official Mohammed al-Bukhaiti told the Russian newspaper Izvestia. “Moreover, we are ready to ensure the safe passage of their ships in the Red Sea because free navigation plays a significant role for our country.”
Those assurances did not protect Russian and Chinese goods being shipped on vessels flying the flags of other countries, including those with no direct ties to Israel.
In a speech on Thursday, the head of Ansarallah, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, vowed to continue the Red Sea campaign unless Israel allowed Hamas to thrive — leaving open the possibility of another attack similar to October 7. Al-Houthi claimed that the U.S. military was secretly running the Israeli self-defense operation.
“America sends its officers to the region to manage Zionist crimes. America is directly involved in the starvation of the Palestinian people. Not only are they starting [sic] them, but they are giving bombs to Israel to kill them,” he claimed.
Al-Houthi also claimed the U.S. and the U.K. are the only threats to commercial shipping in the Red Sea and repeated his terror group’s claim that they would not attack random ships.
“It is the actions of the United States and the United Kingdom that are a danger to navigation and a violation of the sovereignty of the countries of the Red Sea region,” he said, according to a translation by the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV. “We only target Israeli ships. Our goal is to exert pressure to deliver food and medicine to the Palestinian people and to prevent Zionist crimes.”
Al-Houthi justified the disruption to global shipping by declaring Ansarallah’s terrorism “a holy act, which we consider to be a part of Jihad in the path of Allah.”