RIYADH: What kind of relationship binds the Houthis to Iran? Afrah Al-Zouba, the first woman to head Yemen’s Foreign Ministry, has a term for it: “mutual instrumentalization.”
“I use the term because it describes the relationship more accurately,” Al-Zouba told Asharq Al-Awsat in her first interview since taking on the challenging portfolio.
The Houthis, she said, “are not merely a tool with no domestic project of their own. At the same time, what they have become cannot be separated from their deep and accumulated relationship with Iran.”
She went further.
The group “is not simply an arm,” Al-Zouba said. “It is a threat in its own right, whose interests intersect with the Iranian project wherever that helps expand its influence and impose a fait accompli.”
