Yemen’s Houthi Rebels Threaten to Take Power If No Deal Is Reached

Over the weekend, Yemen’s Houthi rebels set a 72-hour deadline for making a deal on the political transition. Today, they reiterated that deadline is very much still a thing, even though the politicians stopped talking.

The Houthis, who control the capital city of Sanaa and most of the west coast of Yemen, now say that they’ll seize power outright on Wednesday, if no transition deal is reached before that, and will impose their own transition strategy.

So far it is unclear what the Houthis’ unilateral strategy is, but they’ve made it clear they prefer to have something that will give their political allies some increased influence.

While they can certainly do that with a unilateral takeover, the group also would like to keep the appearance of an at least relatively democratic transition of power, which shouldn’t be that hard given the ousted president was elected in a single candidate vote, but does require at least some nominal support on the part of some other political factions.