On September 21, the Huthis celebrated the ninth anniversary of their capture of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, a pivotal moment that marked the beginning of the Zaydi Shia rebel movement’s counterrevolution to the 1962 republican revolution and the era of relative equality and political pluralism it ushered in after more than a millennium of Zaydi imamate rule in northern Yemen. If you asked Yemeni insiders a decade ago whether the Huthis could engineer a military coup alongside their erstwhile enemy, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh,1 and derail the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)–brokered political transition underway since Arab Spring–inspired protests ousted Saleh in 2011, most of them would probably have laughed at the idea. But in the six months between the Huthi storming of Sana’a and the intervention of a Saudi-led military coalition in March 2015, the Huthis managed not only to consolidate control of the capital but overrun most of...

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