A US warship and three commercial vessels have been attacked by rockets launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels into the Red Sea.
The USS Carney shot down a Houthi drone in “self-defence” on Sunday and destroyed three more targeted at commercial ships linked to 14 nations including the UK.
Now, Saudi Arabia has urged the US to show restraint in its response to the Iran-backed rebel group’s attack amid fears of a wider regional conflict.
The US has suggested the attacks on their vessels may not have been intentional. “The Carney took action as a drone was headed in its direction,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said. “We can’t assess that the Carney at this time was the intended target,”
But regardless of their intentions, who are Yemen’s Houthi rebels? How are they linked to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and why are they attacking Western ships now?
“It’s clearly linked to a broader strategy of Iran, which is the main backer of the Houthis,” militant jihadist expert Dr Elisabeth Kendall told The Independent.
“It is designed to ramp up pressure on Israel, America and other allies to stop the war in Gaza. The Houthis are armed, sponsored and trained by Iran as part of the so-called axis of resistance,” Dr Kendall said.
The Houthis, formed in the late 1990s, developed as political-religious Shi’ite movement and launched a series of guerrilla wars against Yemen’s national army.
The group seized the country’s capital of Sana’a when the Yemen civil war started in 2014, which caused neighbouring Sunni Islam Saudi Arabia to intervene at the head of a Western-backed coalition over fears of growing Shi’ite influence on its border.
Since then, the group has developed an arsenal including ballistic missiles and armed drones capable of hitting Israel more than 1,000 miles from Sana’a.
The Houthis fired these missiles at Saudi Arabia dozens of times during the Yemen war. In September, the Houthis displayed anti-aircraft Barq-2 missiles, naval missiles, a Mig-29 fighter jet and helicopters for the first time.
Saudi Arabia and the US have accused Iran of “fully enabling” the rebel group to attack Israel and Western ships in the Red Sea. Iran denies the allegations, and says the Houthis are autonomous.
But experts say the Houthis, a long with Gaza’s Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, form part of Iran’s “axis of resistance” -a military alliance built over four decades to oppose Israeli and American power in the Middle East.
The alliance comprises a group of violent proxies across Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, coordinated by Israel’s Quds Force, which is aimed at exporting Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution abroad.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the most powerful group in the axis, boasts 100,000 fighters, has exchanged fire with Israeli forces since Hamas went to war with Israel and more than 70 of its fighters have been killed.
The US also says its troops in Syria and Iraq have been attacked at least 55 times by Iran-backed proxies since Hamas’s assault on Israel on 7 October.