"Multi-dimensional strategy".. American website: Defeating the Houthis will require more than just killing their leader (analysis)

Finally, as the Houthis demonstrated by sending mercenaries to fight for Russia in Ukraine, the group is willing to sell goods and services to rogue actors around the world in order to bring in much-needed cash. Unfortunately, these threats are unlikely to be eliminated with a single drone strike.

It is also important to make clear that the assassination of Abdulmalik al-Houthi is justified on moral, legal, and national security grounds. He has dragged Yemen into decades of unnecessary war that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, ruled twenty million Yemenis with merciless brutality that includes murder, rape, and theft, and destabilized the Middle East through Houthi attacks on their regional neighbors as well as international maritime trade.

Moreover, Patrick Johnston makes a compelling case that organizations are vulnerable after the assassination of senior leaders, noting that “neutralizing Houthi rebel leaders has a large and statistically significant impact on several measures of counter-extremism effectiveness.”

But the fact that justice and national interests will be served by killing Abdul-Malik al-Houthi is not a reason to maximize the organizational impact of his death for the anti-Houthi strategy.

There are at least four reasons why the killing of the Houthi leader may be disappointing to those who had high expectations for him:

First , it is important to recognize that the Houthis have essentially evolved from a rebel group into a quasi-state. The Houthis were partly institutionalized by their takeover of the existing Yemeni state apparatus after marching on the capital, Sanaa, in 2014, and they consolidated their control over the institution after killing Ali Abdullah Saleh and purging his loyalists from the bureaucracy in 2017.

Abdul Hakim al-Khaiwani leads the security and intelligence apparatus and focuses on controlling all aspects of civilian life, from suppressing political agitators and indoctrinating the public to ensuring that resources are distributed in line with the regime’s interests. Other state mechanisms for controlling the public include the police intelligence, led by Abdul Malik’s nephew, and the Central Security Forces.

These multiple, far-reaching, and overlapping organizations dedicated to ensuring regime control and preventing the emergence of threats are likely to be far more extensive than standard terrorist organizations.

This raises questions about whether some of the alleged advantages of killing senior terrorist leaders promoted by scholars such as Brian C. Price can be applied to the case of the Houthis.

In his 2012 article, “Targeting Top Terrorists,” Price explains that “beheading leaders significantly increases the death rate among terrorist groups, even after controlling for other factors.”

However, his research appears to focus on informal rebel groups ranging in size from tens to several thousand people. While we acknowledge that succession is always a challenge in any organization, it is also important to clarify that Price’s findings do not necessarily cover an organization like the Houthis.

Given the many institutions dedicated to ensuring the continuation of Houthi rule over the people and economy of northern Yemen, the regime in Sanaa might best be described as a hybrid between a terrorist group like al-Qaeda and a rogue authoritarian regime like Iran or North Korea.

Second , the Houthis and their backers in Beirut and Tehran have had ample time to prepare for assassination attempts on Abdulmalik al-Houthi. They are likely taking measures to prevent such strikes from succeeding and preparing a mechanism for the aftermath.

“If a terrorist group maintains a core of experienced and capable fighters or has an established line of succession, targeted killings have little impact on the group’s capabilities,” he wrote.

Larger, older terrorist groups are better able to survive leadership targeting, perhaps because they have better-prepared successors or a larger pool of high-level members willing to take over.”

After decades of conflict and hundreds of thousands of troops in their ranks, the Houthis have a large pool of experienced and well-prepared potential successors to Abdulmalik. According to Klein, these characteristics could put them in a position to mitigate the impact of the leader’s assassination.

Third, there are relevant historical examples where successful assassinations of terrorist leaders failed to negatively impact battlefield performance or even pave the way for more capable leaders to take over.

One could argue that Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi in 1992 paved the way for the more capable Hassan Nasrallah to take control of the organization. Before his death in 2024, Nasrallah had built the organization into the largest and best-funded terrorist organization in the world.

Examples of this same disturbing phenomenon are occurring inside Yemen. Abdulmalik took control of the Houthi movement only after his brother Hussein was killed by the Yemeni government in 2004. Since then, he has built a small-arms guerrilla movement into a state-like apparatus with a dangerous arsenal of ballistic missiles.

More recently, prominent Houthis killed by the anti-Houthi coalition include Taha al-Madani, a senior Houthi battlefield commander who was killed in 2016; Saleh al-Samad, who was the equivalent of the Houthi prime minister and was assassinated in 2018; and Ibrahim al-Houthi, Abdulmalik’s brother who described himself as a “prominent leader” before his death in 2019.

All of these individuals have been replaced and their deaths have not led to organizational chaos. While it is true that none of these individuals were as powerful or prominent as Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, and that his death may have had a far greater impact than other senior leaders in the movement, the burden of proof lies with those who claim that such a blow would destroy the group and undermine its long-term trajectory.

Finally , pinning the anti-Houthi strategy on an operation that will take a long time to prepare and does not guarantee the successful elimination of the target, let alone the collapse of the regime, would be an unnecessarily risky gamble.

It may take some time to develop the real-time intelligence needed to assassinate Abdulmalik, and it may take even longer for the operational opportunity to arise to launch the strike.

This may also lead to complacency at the same time that there are other valuable activities that can and should be undertaken to undermine the regime's economic, repressive, military, media and organizational infrastructure.

As Johnston explains in his article “Does Decapitation Work?” “Although decapitation is likely to help states’ overall efforts against militant groups, other factors will also be quite important in most cases.”

multidimensional approach

Indeed, Israel's successful campaign to weaken and subjugate Lebanon's Hezbollah suggests that attempts to defeat institutionalized "terrorist states" must focus beyond any single individual.

While Israel assassinated Nasrallah, it also killed multiple layers of senior and mid-level leadership through airstrikes and sabotage campaigns.

Its strikes also targeted Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure, military arsenal, and media operations. Israel also complemented its military activities with a diplomatic campaign to isolate Hezbollah and empower alternative power centers within Lebanon. This multi-dimensional approach provides the anti-Houthi coalition with a more effective and comprehensive model for weakening Iran’s proxy in Yemen.

In Colin Clarke's 2021 article on War on the Rocks , Clarke assessed that leadership is only one element of a terrorist group's infrastructure and that eliminating a single individual is usually not enough to bring down an established and experienced organization.

As he put it, “The majority of evidence suggests that it is most effective to disrupt terrorist organizations and insurgent networks by focusing on disrupting supply lines, attacking logistical capabilities, and denying insurgents the ability to enjoy external support from state and non-state actors.

This is not to say that killing high-value targets is ineffective, but rather that decapitation is just one of many tactics that must be used as part of a broader strategy and that its effectiveness is often situational.”

Efforts to assassinate Abdulmalik are justified to weaken the Houthi regime and are likely to yield significant benefits, but they will not necessarily be enough to defeat the group or the threats it poses.

It is tempting to look for easy solutions to strategic problems with a single goal, but this approach will inevitably lead to ill-informed strategies and disappointing results.

In order to decisively defeat the Houthi regime, the United States, Israel, and those seeking stability in the region must destroy the structure that enables the regime to function: its economy, its propaganda machine, its tools of repression, its military capabilities, and its multi-level leadership.

As Clarke explained, “Terrorist groups appear more likely to survive the elimination of a leader than the paralysis of their supply infrastructure.”

While there seem unlikely to be shortcuts to defeating the Houthis, launching such a comprehensive campaign would be far less costly than failing to do so.

Source: warontherocks , military