He was imprisoned and tortured by the Houthis. He’s counselling diplomacy, not war

The Houthis' alliance with Iran is “a bit of a marriage of convenience,” but “there is no winning this battle militarily,” says Hisham Al-Omeisy, senior adviser at the European Institute of Peace in Washington. Photo by Courtesy Hisham Al-Omeisy

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The Houthis are back on the front page after a week of strikes on Saudi airports, including the main terminal in Riyadh, and the question everyone is asking is how to contain them.

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The same problem runs through the Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow strait at the bottom of the Red Sea. The Houthis don’t have to sink every vessel or seal the waterway. A few missile hits, or a credible threat of one, are enough to make insurers treat the route as a war zone, jack up premiums, and push some captains the long way around Africa. Oil and freight get more expensive either way.

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I called someone I have known since the late 1990s. Hisham Al-Omeisy, 47, was born in Sana’a and was among the first of about 100 students chosen, on merit, for a Nexen scholarship program I helped design. He studied at the University of Calgary, went home, worked for the U.S. State Department in Yemen, and stayed after the Houthis seized the institutions of government in 2015. In August 2017 the Houthis picked him up and held him for five months. He was released in January 2018 and got out of the country. He is now a senior adviser at the European Institute of Peace in Washington, which is a polite way of saying he spends his time trying to get people who would rather shoot each other into the same room.

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“A lot of my colleagues from the State Department left, and so did a lot of foreigners, when the Houthis came crashing through Sana’a’s gates,” he told me. “I chose to stay, to focus on humanitarian issues.” The Houthis turned on him when he started saying their leadership was “living lavishly inside the country while everyone else was suffering.” Between torture sessions, he says, they put him and the other prisoners into dark, dungeon-like cells “to stimulate the feeling you’re being buried alive. It’s meant to break your spirit.” He counts himself lucky; dozens of people he knows are still inside these Houthi prisons, and some of them are very sick.

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When we talk, he has just landed back in Washington from Nairobi, where he had been working back-channel talks. “Unfortunately,” he says, the Houthis were not at the table “because of their FTO designation,” the U.S. foreign-terrorist-organization listing Washington restored in 2025.

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Ask him about a bombing campaign and he does not pause. “There is no winning this battle militarily.” A lot of people, he says, think they can fix it with “a couple bombs here, a couple of strikes there,” but what you get is levelled cities, and “ultimately, it’s the average Yemeni who’s gonna be paying the price — mothers, kids, children, elderly. I’ve seen that first-hand.”

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He says the Houthis are not simply an Iranian proxy. Their roots in northern Yemen are old, and although Iran trains them, arms them and has folded them into the Axis of Resistance, “the Houthis have their own ambitions, their own religious dogma, and their beliefs are not necessarily aligned with the Iranians. It’s a bit of a marriage of convenience.”

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The Gaza strikes, he says, were a launchpad more than a rescue mission. “Everyone kept dismissing the Houthis as a fringe, crazy group, and now they have missiles that can reach all the way to Tel Aviv.” Their leader, he adds, talks as if he has a divine claim on the Muslim world. Yemen, in that telling, is a recruiting ground, not a country to be rebuilt.