The most intriguing part of the article is the surprise of residents of Sanaa on seeing Houthi checkpoints to be manned by their neighbors who previously couldn't care less about Houthis. This may indicate further sectarianization of the conflict with Zaidi Shia outside the Houthi traditional stronghold of Saada increasingly flocking to the group.
# Vice News
The Houthis Are Battling al Qaeda Amid a 'Slow-Burning Coup' in Yemen () {
By = Peter Salisbury
Date = October 28, 2014
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Checkpoints manned by Yemeni men in traditional garb sprang up across Sanaa. Many of the men decorated their guns, their cars, and even their foreheads with stickers and banners bearing the Houthis' sarkha slogan spelled out in red and green on a white background
"Death to America, Death to Israel, Damned be the Jews, Victory to Islam."
The sarkha is visible just about everywhere the Houthis are. It's a supremely effective piece of marketing, marking anyone who chooses to display it as a supporter of the group. The slogan's presence in Sanaa has come to be seen as a signal that the Houthis — once a small religious revivalist movement, now a popular and powerful political movement — are an unstoppable military force that is effectively in control of the capital. When the slogan is seen elsewhere in the country, it is seen as a sign that the Houthis are on their way.
And the slogan is everywhere. In central Yemen, the group is battling al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the local franchise of the extremist movement that the US government saw as the most dangerous radical Islamist group in the world before the Islamic State sprang up in Syria and Iraq. In mid-October, sarkha-bedecked men took control of Hodeidah port on Yemen's western coast. The group has also expanded south into Ibb and Taiz provinces, where it is battling both al Qaeda affiliates and local tribes.
Where a year ago they would have scoffed at such an idea, residents of Aden, a port city in the south of Yemen, are now genuinely worried that the Houthis, who hail from the other side of the country, could soon be surveying the Indian Ocean.
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Khaled, who lives in central Sanaa but was working outside the capital during the fighting there, described his surprise to VICE News upon returning to find friends and acquaintances who were agnostic in their politics manning Houthi checkpoints in the city center. "I know these people," he said. "They aren't Houthis. They… couldn't care less about the Houthis."
Sanaa residents have by now realized that most Houthi checkpoints are manned not by fighters from Sadah, but by locals. As a result, talk has been less about the "Houthi takeover" of Sanaa and more about the "takeover of Sanaa."
This reassessment is not unique to the capital city. A resident of Taiz disputes the extent to which the "Houthi" presence in the area is made up of bona fide fighters from the north. "All the people here that I can see who say they are Houthis, I recognize," he says, indicating that the supposed Houthis are instead locals. He adds that the bulk of the armed men in the city come from a local division of the Republican Guard, a military unit once run by Saleh's son. Even the fighters who aren't local, he says, aren't from Sadah. Their accents don't match up.
(...)
Source = https://t.co/JHp8UEBpKq }
Video = A boy performs the Houthi "scream" during a demonstration in Sanaa
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