Houthi Flag Meaning: What the Houthi Slogan Says

It says five things, always in this order: “Allahu akbar” (God is great), “al-mawt li-Amrika” (death to America), “al-mawt li-Isra’il” (death to Israel), “al-la’na ‘ala al-Yahud” (a curse upon the Jews) and “al-nasr li-l-Islam” (victory to Islam).

In Arabic the lines read الله أكبر، الموت لأمريكا، الموت لإسرائيل، اللعنة على اليهود، النصر للإسلام. The movement calls the slogan al-Sarkha, “the scream” or “the cry”, because it was meant to be shouted together by a crowd. It is chanted at the end of Friday sermons and at the movement’s weekly rallies in Sanaa, painted on walls across the north of Yemen, and printed on banners, stickers and car windows.

The colours separate the religious lines from the hostile ones: green for the two lines about God and Islam, red for the three lines against America, Israel and the Jews.

Green is the colour long associated with Islam, and the movement places it at the top and bottom of the banner, framing the whole text, with a green border around the white field. Red, the colour of blood, carries the three calls for death and cursing in the middle. The movement has never published an official specification for the banner, so sizes, fonts and the exact shades vary from one print to the next, and some versions are hung vertically and others horizontally. The order of the lines and the green and red division stay the same.

Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the movement’s founder, created it in January 2002, when he first had his students chant it at a religious school in the Saada region of northern Yemen.

He presented it as an answer to what he called the American project in the region. That was four months after the September 11 attacks and during the second Palestinian intifada. The model was the chants of Iran’s 1979 revolution, which made “death to America” a political rallying cry, and the wording echoes the language of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Houthis took it up as their official slogan in 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The slogan became a test of loyalty and a direct challenge to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, then a U.S. partner against al-Qaeda. His government banned it. On June 18, 2004, police arrested about 640 of al-Houthi’s followers chanting it outside the Great Mosque of Sanaa. The same month the government’s campaign against him in Saada turned into open war, and the Yemeni government announced his death in September 2004. The six Saada wars that followed lasted until 2010. When the Houthis seized Sanaa in September 2014, the banner went up on government buildings and checkpoints across the capital.

The Houthis say the calls for death target the policies of the American and Israeli governments, not people, but the words themselves make no such distinction.

In 2015 the Houthi spokesman Ali al-Bukhayti said the movement did not really want death to anyone and that the slogan was aimed at U.S. and Israeli interference in the region. The fourth line is harder to explain away, because it names Jews rather than a state. The U.S. State Department designated the Houthis an “entity of particular concern” for severe violations of religious freedom on December 29, 2023, In August 2025 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said Houthi school curricula teach antisemitic tropes, with a ninth-grade module describing Jews as deceptive and greedy. Yemen’s ancient Jewish community has all but disappeared from Houthi-held areas.

The movement has also acted on the words. Its fighters seized the car carrier Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea on November 19, 2023, citing its owner’s Israeli links, and held its 25 crew members until January 22, 2025. The United States designated the movement, which calls itself Ansar Allah, a Foreign Terrorist Organization effective March 5, 2025. After an earlier U.S. terrorism listing in 2024, a further line appeared on Houthi banners and in chants: “America is the mother of terrorism.”

The Houthis fly three: the slogan banner, the red, white and black flag of Yemen, and, since the Gaza war began in October 2023, the Palestinian flag.

The slogan banner is the party’s own. The national tricolour, adopted when North and South Yemen united on May 22, 1990, is the flag the Houthi-run authorities in Sanaa fly as Yemen’s government, a claim the internationally recognised government in Aden rejects. At the weekly rallies in Sanaa’s al-Sabeen Square, crowds wave all three side by side. For more on why the movement is fighting and who backs it, see our explainer why the Houthis attack Saudi Arabia and who supports them, and our comparison of Saudi and Houthi military power.

Hezbollah’s flag is a picture; the Houthi banner is only words.

Hezbollah’s flag is yellow, with a green emblem showing an arm raising an assault rifle out of the word “Allah” and a Quranic verse that gives the party its name: “Then surely the party of God are they that shall be triumphant.” The Houthi banner carries no emblem, no weapon and no party name. Both movements belong to the alliance Iran calls the axis of resistance, and both draw their chants from the Iranian revolution, but the Houthis chose to make the slogan itself their symbol.

The Houthi banner has five lines of Arabic text on a white field with a green border. Two lines are green and three are red. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi coined the slogan in January 2002 in the Saada region. The Houthis adopted it as their official slogan in 2003. Police arrested about 640 people chanting it in Sanaa on June 18, 2004. Hussein al-Houthi was killed in September 2004. The Houthis took Sanaa in September 2014. The United States designated the movement a Foreign Terrorist Organization effective March 5, 2025.