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.