Who Is Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the Houthi Leader?

He is the head of the armed movement that has ruled Sanaa and most of Yemen’s population since September 2014. His full name is Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, also spelled Abdulmalik or Abdel-Malek, and his followers call him “Sayyid”, a title that claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad. The movement’s own media style him “Leader of the Revolution”.

No official record gives his exact birth date. The US Treasury lists his birth year as 1980, 1981 or 1982; other profiles say 1979. That makes him between 44 and 47 years old in November 2026. He was born in Saada governorate, the mountainous Zaydi heartland on Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia; the Treasury names the town of Dahyan.

He grew up in the revival movement his family led in the 1990s, known first as the Believing Youth. When government forces killed his brother Hussein in September 2004, during the first of six wars fought in Saada between 2004 and 2010, the younger brother took over. Under his command the Houthis outlasted those wars against President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s army and seized Sanaa on September 21, 2014, a date the movement marks as its revolution. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015.

His father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, was a senior Zaydi cleric and the movement’s spiritual authority until he died on November 25, 2010. His elder brother Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi founded the movement and coined, in January 2002, the five-line slogan explained in what the Houthi flag says. Hussein was killed in the Marran mountains of Saada in September 2004; the movement takes its popular name from him.

Another brother, Abd al-Khaliq al-Houthi, is a Houthi military commander. On November 7, 2014, he was one of the first three people placed under United Nations sanctions over Yemen, together with former president Saleh.

He is Shia, from the Zaydi branch, which is different from the Twelver Shiism of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Zaydis, sometimes called “Fivers”, recognise a different line of imams, reject the Twelver idea of a hidden, infallible imam, and allow any qualified descendant of the Prophet’s cousin Ali to lead, including by revolt against an unjust ruler. In law and ritual, Zaydism is often described as the Shia school closest to Sunni Islam.

Zaydi imams ruled northern Yemen until the 1962 revolution. Roughly a third of Yemenis are Zaydi. The Houthis’ critics, including Yemen’s internationally recognised government, accuse him of seeking to restore rule by the Prophet’s descendants; he presents the movement as a resistance to the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

He holds no state office, but he sits above every Houthi institution. The Supreme Political Council in Sanaa is the movement’s formal government; its chairman since April 2018, Mahdi al-Mashat, previously ran Abdul-Malik’s office. His speeches set the line that ministers, commanders and the movement’s spokesmen then repeat.

He almost never appears in public. He speaks to his followers through long televised addresses, often weekly, recorded at undisclosed locations, and he is known to have met foreign officials only by video link. Where he lives is not publicly known; he is believed to move between safe houses in Saada and the Sanaa area.

Yes. He is wanted by Saudi Arabia and sentenced to death by Yemen’s government, and he is under United Nations and US sanctions, though no US arrest warrant or personal US reward has been issued for him.

The UN Security Council listed him on April 14, 2015, the day it adopted Resolution 2216, which freezes his assets, bans his travel and bars arms deliveries to him. The US Treasury sanctioned him the same day. On November 6, 2017, Saudi Arabia offered $30 million for information leading to him, the largest bounty on its list of 40 Houthi leaders. On August 25, 2021, a military court of Yemen’s government in Marib sentenced him and 173 others to death in absentia.

Washington has also designated the movement itself: as a terrorist group from February 16, 2024, and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization from March 5, 2025. In March 2025 the State Department offered up to $15 million for information that disrupts Houthi finances.

As of November 10, 2026, no government or Houthi official has reported him killed or wounded. A rumour in mid-October 2026 that he had been hurt in an airstrike has not been confirmed by anyone on the record, and earlier reports of his death, in 2009 and 2022, proved false.

The men around him have been hit. An Israeli strike on Sanaa on August 28, 2025, killed the Houthi prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi, and several ministers. On October 16, 2025, the movement announced the death of its chief of staff, Muhammad al-Ghamari, and Israel claimed responsibility. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, threatened Abdul-Malik by name on May 16, 2025, promising to “hunt down and eliminate” him, and again on September 19, 2025: “your time will come.”

He has threatened Saudi Arabia’s airports, ports and oil. In a televised speech on July 16, 2026, days after the truce collapsed, he said the equation was “Sanaa airport for Riyadh airport, airports for airports, ports for ports, and blockade for blockade,” and warned that Saudi oil facilities would be targets if Riyadh escalated.

On September 17, 2026, he called Saudi claims that the Houthis had aimed at Mecca a “major lie” and said his forces were “in a defensive position”. The attacks continued: a missile killed 13 people at Riyadh’s airport on October 10, and the Houthis struck Aramco’s Riyadh tower on November 8. The threats against Saudi oil claimed in November have come from the movement’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, not from the leader himself. Silent Dossier’s view, set out in Why Are the Houthis Attacking Saudi Arabia?, is that this campaign will not break the kingdom, and the balance of forces in Saudi Arabia vs Houthis shows why.

He has tied his war to Iran’s. On November 14, 2023, he announced that Israeli ships in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb would be targeted, and five days later his forces seized the Galaxy Leader. After the US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, 2026, he said on March 5 that his fighters’ “fingers are on the trigger”.