The United States has sanctioned seven high-ranking members of Yemen’s Ansarallah, also known as the Houthis, just a day after the State Department designated the group a terrorist organization—reversing its delisting in 2021 under the Biden administration.
According to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the seven sanctioned operatives were involved in smuggling “military-grade” weapons into Yemen and negotiating Houthi weapons procurements from Russia. Those sanctioned include the Houthis’ Oman-based spokesman, the chairman of the Houthi-aligned Supreme Political Council, and the head of the Houthi-aligned Sana’a Chamber of Commerce.
While the Houthis are already subject to a U.N. arms embargo (U.N. Resolution 2140), the OFAC designations add another layer of sanctions. However, according to Wolf-Christian Paes, a former member of the U.N. panel of experts on Yemen, these new measures do not necessarily strengthen the embargo’s effectiveness.
“The main difference with these new sanctions will be how the U.S. enforces them because the weakness of the U.N. sanctions regime is always enforcement,” Paes said. “The U.N. has no policeman. So the question is how the U.S. government will enforce them.”
Additionally, OFAC sanctioned Yemeni businessman Abdulwali Abdoh Hasan Al-Jabri, a key figure in OCCRP’s October 2024 investigation into Yemeni recruits in the Russian army. The report revealed that Yemeni recruits, lured by lucrative job offers, later realized they had been deceived into combat roles in Ukraine and pleaded for help to return home.
“While Yemeni recruits may not be a make-or-break factor in Russia’s war effort, they are obviously important enough for Russia to care. If they didn’t need these people, they wouldn’t go to all that effort,” Paes told OCCRP.
Some of these recruits had been working for subsistence wages in Oman when Al-Jabri’s company approached them with an enticing offer—non-combat roles in the Russian military for about $3,000 a month. However, after signing contracts with the Russian army for what they believed to be security or construction jobs, the recruits found themselves on the front lines in Ukraine.
Yemen's military attaché in Russia, Brigadier General Fouad Al Muhtadi, previously suggested that there was little his government could do, saying, “The volunteer becomes subject to military law and its mechanisms.”
Al-Jabri is a member of the Houthis’ parliament, which emerged after the group took control of Sana’a and much of Yemen’s highlands in 2014.
The Yemen-based Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies described Al-Jabri as “a well-known General People’s Congress (GPC) figure from Taiz who has been ostracized by its Sana’a-based branch for his close alignment with the Houthis in recent years.”
According to OFAC, Al-Jabri is a “Houthi militant operative who served as a so-called major general in the Houthi militia.” In 2021, he was reportedly among 174 Houthi leaders sentenced to death in absentia by a military court representing Yemen’s internationally recognized government.
OFAC also accused Al-Jabri of running “a lucrative human smuggling operation” on behalf of the Houthis through his company, Al-Jabri General Trading and Investment Co. OCCRP obtained the corporate registration of the company, which was established in Oman in 2022 and is solely owned by him.
It is unclear from the OFAC notice whether Al-Jabri was involved in weapons smuggling. However, the U.N. panel of experts on Yemen noted in a letter to the U.N. Security Council in November 2023 that “the Government of Yemen had made 10 seizures of material reportedly meant for the Houthis, in violation of the targeted arms embargo.”
The panel added that on January 6, 2023, the U.S. intercepted a “stateless dhow” in the Gulf of Oman carrying 1,918 Type 56-1 assault rifles—similar in markings and technical characteristics to those manufactured in China—as well as 198 AKS-20U compact assault rifles, which resembled those made in Russia.
Abdulqader Al-Kharraz, a former senior Yemeni government official (2017-2019), told OCCRP that the sanctions highlight the complexity of Yemen’s situation and its impact on international security.
“The smuggling of weapons from Russia to Yemen and the recruitment of Yemenis into the Russian-Ukrainian war reflect the growing ties between the Houthis and other countries,” he said.
He also emphasized the significance of the U.S. move. “The decision represents an important and long-awaited stand against the Houthi militia, which may play a role in drying up their financial resources,” he explained.
“Perhaps now, with the American designations, the Yemeni authorities may take action,” he added.
The Houthi leadership did not respond to OCCRP’s request for comment.
