Who are the Houthis?

It was a merchant sailor's nightmare: armed men in balaclavas dropping from a helicopter before storming the ship's bridge, ordering the civilian crew to lie down at gunpoint and cutting all communications.

The scene played out late last year on the Galaxy Leader cargo ship, which was seized in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels who forced it to switch course to Yemen. It was one of the most audacious of more than two dozen attacks carried out by the Yemeni Islamist movement on merchant ships over the past two months.

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