page_title: Houthi movement
section_title: Cultural
hierarchical_section_title: Houthi movement / Activism and tactics / Cultural
caption_attribution_description: English: Houthis protest against airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition on Sana'a in September 2015.
context_page_description: The Houthi movement, officially called Ansar Allah and colloquially simply Houthis, is an Islamic political and armed movement that emerged from Sa'dah in northern Yemen in the 1990s. The movement was called Houthis because its founder is from the Houthi tribe. They are of the Zaidi school, though the movement also includes Sunnis. Under the leadership of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the group emerged as an opposition to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom they charged with massive financial corruption and criticized for being backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States at the expense of the Yemeni people and Yemen's sovereignty. Resisting Saleh's order for his arrest, Hussein was killed in Sa'dah in 2004 along with a number of his guards by the Yemeni army, sparking the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Since then, except for a short intervening period, the movement has been led by his brother Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
  The Houthi movement attracts its Zaidi-Shia followers in Yemen by promoting regional political-religious issues in its media, including the overarching U.S.–Israeli conspiracy theory and Arab "collusion".
context_section_description: The Houthis have also held a number of mass gatherings since the revolution. On 24 January 2013, thousands gathered in Dahiyan, Sa'dah and Heziez, just outside Sanaa, to celebrate Mawlid al-Nabi, the birth of Mohammed. A similar event took place on 13 January 2014 at the main sports' stadium in Sanaa. On this occasion, men and women were completely segregated: men filled the open-air stadium and football field in the centre, guided by appointed Houthi safety officials wearing bright vests and matching hats; women poured into the adjacent indoor stadium, led inside by security women distinguishable only by their purple sashes and matching hats. The indoor stadium held at least five thousand women—ten times as many attendees as the 2013 gathering.
caption: A Houthi holds up an image of Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement leader, during protests against the Saudi Arabian-led coalition
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