Houthis Are Back on the US Terror List

The United States on Wednesday put Yemen's Houthis rebels back on its list of specially designated global terrorists, piling financial sanctions on top of American military strikes in the Biden administration's latest attempt to stop the militants' attacks on global shipping. Officials said they would design the financial penalties to minimize harm to Yemen's 32 million people, who are among the world's poorest and hungriest after years of war between the Iran-backed Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition, the AP reports. But aid officials expressed concern. The decision would only add "another level of uncertainty and threat for Yemenis still caught in one of the world's largest humanitarian crises," Oxfam America associate director Scott Paul said.

Donald Trump's administration designated the Houthis as global terrorists and a foreign terrorist organization in one of his last acts in office. President Biden reversed course early on, at the time citing the humanitarian threat that the sanctions posed to ordinary Yemenis. Military strikes by the US and Britain against Houthi targets in Yemen have failed to stop weeks of drone, rocket, and missile strikes by Houthi forces on commercial shipping transiting the Red Sea route, which borders Yemen. The Houthis are one in a network of Iran- and Hamas-allied militant groups around the Middle East that have escalated attacks on Israel, the US, and others during Israel's military offensive in Gaza.

Critics say the additional broad US sanctions may have little effect on the Houthis, a defiant and relatively isolated group with few known assets in the US to be threatened. There is also concern that designating the Houthis as terrorists may complicate international attempts to broker a peace deal in the now-subsided war with Saudi Arabia. US officials said the sanctions would exempt commercial shipments of food, medicine, and fuel, and humanitarian assistance into Yemeni ports. The US will wait 30 days to put the sanctions into effect, officials said, giving shipping companies, banks, insurers, and others time to prepare. (More Houthis stories.)