Malik al-Houthi had never met an international diplomat before. Clothed in traditional Yemeni dress, he waited patiently at a modest house in the country’s isolated north, his hair apparently freshly cut.

It was April 2011, and Yemen was on the brink of all-out civil war with anti-government protests, part of the wave of regional uprisings known as the Arab Spring that was spreading across the Middle East. The United Nations envoy to the country at the time, Jamal Benomar, eventually arrived to meet the little-known commander of the Houthis, dismissed by many as a ragtag militia.

“The guy you meet is a gentleman, speaks with a soft voice, extremely polite,” recalled Benomar, who said he was the only diplomat known to have met al-Houthi in person. “Even if he doesn’t like what you are saying, he will never interrupt and stop you from saying something he doesn’t like.”Fifteen years later, that reserved 31-year-old has become one of the Middle East’s most consequential and enigmatic figures.

Al-Houthi presides over a militant group that’s taken over swathes of Yemen, often brutally suppressing the people under its control. The Houthis’ reach extends far beyond the country as they disrupt global trade, rattle energy markets and fire missiles at Saudi Arabia, whose allied forces on the ground are leading a coalition that vowed at the weekend to eliminate them.

Proscribed as a terrorist organization by Donald Trump’s administration, the Houthis amassed an arsenal capable of reaching hundreds of miles, striking oil facilities and commercial shipping in the Red Sea. They launched deadly drone attacks at Israel. In September, they seized control of territory overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.

They also raised their ranking within Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. As Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were battered in the conflicts that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel, the Houthis grew more confident about their own value to the alliance.

They are taking on some of the role that Hezbollah played under Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike two years ago said Hamidreza Azizi, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group and author of a book on the Axis of Resistance. “Not simply as another member of the network, but as a hub connecting and supporting other actors,” he said.

The Houthis ousted Yemen’s government in 2014, imposing a repressive rule, recruiting child soldiers and embroiling Yemen in a civil war. It provoked one of the worst humanitarian crises in a nation that was already one of the poorest in the world.

Yemen’s internationally recognized government last weekend launched a full-scale military campaign to retake territory after weeks of escalating clashes between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia dragged Yemen back into a fully-fledged conflict.

But after surviving more than two decades of war, the Houthis are more emboldened than ever before. Their leader inherited the group as a young man when it was fighting for survival in Yemen’s remote, mountainous north. They now rule the capital, Sanaa, and most of Yemen’s north and western coastline, home to roughly 70% of the population.

Al-Houthi’s rise is all the more striking given how little of the world he had seen. There is no evidence he ever travelled to Iran or even saw much of Yemen. Al-Houthi rarely meets outsiders. He holds no formal position in the Houthi administration and is seldom seen beyond televised speeches delivered from an undisclosed location, emulating the late Hezbollah leader Nasrallah. Few know where he lives.

Born in 1979 in Saada, an impoverished province bordering Saudi Arabia, al-Houthi grew up in one of northern Yemen’s prominent families of Zaydi religious scholars.

His father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, was a prominentcleric who spent much of his life teaching and writing about the Zaydi faith, a branch of Shia Islam distinct from the Twelver Shiism dominant in Iran.

Badr al-Din had four wives and a large family. His eldest son, Hussein, became a politician and charismatic preacher whose teachings laid the ideological foundations of the Houthis, according to Marieke Brandt, author of and a senior researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

“Hussein was such an influential figure that his impact was felt across the family and his generation,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official who has long worked with al-Houthi, said over Telegram. “He played a major role in shaping Abdul Malik’s thinking and his views on many issues and events.”Al-Houthi had little formal education beyond his family’s religious world, according to Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies, who has followed the Houthi movement closely for many years He never acquired the scholarly credentials of his father or older brother, instead making his name on the battlefield because of his military capabilities, she said.

Yemeni forces killed Hussein al-Houthi in September 2004, at the end of the first of six wars with Saleh’s government in Saada. The movement then gradually coalesced around his younger brother, who was earning a reputation as a commander of guerilla forces.

What made him stand out was “his ability to deal with difficult circumstances, earn the trust of those around him, and demonstrate his leadership in practice,” said al-Bukhaiti.

The government repeatedly tried and failed to crush the Houthis in their northern stronghold during the Saada wars. They survived, but the areas around them in Saada were devasted by years of war.

“The shelling was so intense that he could no longer tell from the sound when his rifle magazine was empty,” said al-Bukhaiti. “He only realized when the rifle stopped recoiling against his shoulder.”The Saada wars forged the circle that remains closest to al-Houthi. Many of the senior figures around him today are men who fought alongside him during those years and power remains concentrated at the top.

The Houthis leave little room for those who stray from their political, social or religious line. Successive crackdowns have swept up critics and people working for foreign aid organizations. Women face restrictions on their movement, work and public life, while religious minorities have been subjected to persistent discrimination and persecution.

The renewed fighting has also taken a heavy toll. At least 838 people have been killed and more than 3,600 injured in Yemen since the Houthis resumed hostilities with the internationally recognized government in August, according to the World Health Organization. Many Yemenis have fled across the Red Sea to Djibouti.

Al-Houthi once regularly met with a wide range of Yemenis, but as his power has grown, so too has his isolation. Shuja al-Deen said al-Houthi is “paranoid” and doesn’t trust people easily. Al-Bukhaiti said his seclusion is a security necessity after repeated attempts to kill him, while Al-Houthi keeps a tight grip on the decisions that matter most.

“He rarely gives direct orders, preferring to explain what he wants and bring others with him,” said al-Bukhaiti. When the two first worked together, his instructions were so understated that al-Bukhaiti said he sometimes mistook them for advice.

Ali al-Bukhaiti, a former Houthi official and Mohammed’s brother, remembers al-Houthi in 2011 as shy and attentive, often sitting silently through meetings and listening closely. “Personally, I still love him to this day,” said Ali, who later broke with the Houthis. “But I disagree with his ideas.”As he urged the international community to take the Houthis seriously that year, Benomar said he set out to bring Yemen’s powerbrokers together for dialogue before it was too late. He wanted everyone with influence in the country to be involved, including the young leader of the Houthis.

Tahrir Square in central Sanaa was filled with young people demanding change and an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s three-decade rule. Saleh’s government was jostling with opponents over the country’s future. Few were paying much attention to the rebel movement from the north.

After coordinating with Mahdi al-Mashat, then in his mid 20s and now president of the Supreme Political Council of the Houthis, Benomar traveled north to Saada. He left his UN security detail behind and passed through a series of Houthi checkpoints to reach the stronghold. Benomar remembers driving through rubble and ruins, entire areas levelled by years of fighting.

But the group al-Houthi runs today was galvanized by that destruction.

The Houthis are routinely described as an Iranian proxy. But al-Houthi’s relationship with Tehran developed graduallyinitially through the group’s ties with Hezbollah. The Houthi takeover of Sanaa in 2014 forced Tehran to take the group more seriously. After the Saudi-led coalition started attacking Yemen a year later, the Houthis were driven closer to Iran.

Hezbollah was the model. The Lebanese group had survived wars with a far more powerful military power, Israel, while building military and political power. The Houthis sought to replicate that in Yemen. Iran saw that as an opportunity to widen its Axis of Resistance. The Houthis then increasingly became beneficiaries of Iranian expertise, weapons and training.

“They don’t need to be a proxy if they have the same agenda and the same goals,” Shuja al-Deen said. “Iran doesn’t need to give them orders.”Ties between the Houthis and Tehran entered a new phase after Israel launched its war on Gaza in 2023 in response to Hamas swarming into the south of the country, massacring 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. The Houthis began firing missiles and drones toward Israel and targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea, saying they were acting in support of Palestinians.

The campaign boosted al-Houthi’s regional and international profile and cemented the Houthis as a force to be reckoned with. The US has kept intact the truce it struck with the Houthis last year to end bombing in Yemen, recently holding direct talks with the group in Oman.

Indeed, as the Houthis survived each successive campaign, al-Houthi’s ambitions have grown bigger. He now sees them as a regional force, one that can shape Islam and the Middle East, according to Shuja al-Deen, not just one with an eye on capturing more of Yemen.

“They don’t define themselves as a local group, but as a revolutionary transnational group,” she said. “He is looking at Mecca and Medina more than he is looking at Aden.”