@[email protected]’s account is a bit off on the early history as the North’s monarchy fell during the Cold War not the Arab Spring.

The Yemeni monarchy/imams controlled the region of North Yemen (Sana’a) until it was overthrown in the 1960s by a military coup. North Yemen was then embroiled for the rest of the decade by a civil war between the monarchists (backed by the Saudis) and the republicans (backed by Egypt). The republicans eventually won and a Western-aligned polity opposed to the South in the Cold War.

Meanwhile, South Yemen (Aden) had been colonized and broken off by the British since the 19th century in order to control the Red Sea maritime passage and eventually became a Marxist-Leninist PDR (People’s Democratic Republic) with the help of the USSR.

After the counter-revolutions of the 1990s and the collapse of the USSR, the two polities merged into a unity government with the leadership of North Yemen as the President and the leadership of South Yemen as the vice-president. Predictably, this was not an equal power dynamic. The North antagonized and provoked the South and with the backing of the Clinton administration, a civil war ensued in 1994 to destroy the remnants of socialist Yemen, which had originally been allowed to retain parts of its organization structures under the unity agreement. When the South was defeated, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled North Yemen since 1978, maneuvered his way into remaining president of all of Yemen until 2011 when he was compelled to abdicate.

The “Houthis” are called that because their movement originates from the North Yemeni Zaydi Muslim (a branch of Shia Islam) community, where Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi became a major leader.

It’s a similar story to Iran, where once the socialists were methodically eliminated from political power, the only viable opposition to Western compradorism became those religious factions the liberal state had antagonized. This occurred when the Saleh leadership became closer to the Saudis (an irony given that the Saudis had originally supported the Zaydis, who were the source of monarchist support in the Yemeni civil war of the 1960s) and the Americans in the 2000s during the US “War on Terror.” This is where the movement developed its oppositional stance against the US. Eventually, Saleh attempted to arrest al-Houthi but this caused the latter to become a martyr to his movement when conflict broke out and he was killed in 2004.

An insurgency then broke out against the Saleh government during the 2000s, where Iranian support became crucial. Once Saleh abdicated, they were able to capture Sana’a. This is also the reason why the Saudis decided to support the ousted post-Saleh leadership in 2015, as they only saw an “Iranian proxy” on their doorstep. Their military competency was not able to match their outsized geopolitical ambitions and this is why they’ve been humiliated in Yemen for the past decade since.

Meanwhile, after the defeat of the South Yemeni independence movement in the 1990s civil war, their independence cause has been hijacked in a manner similar to that of the Kurds through the STC (Southern Transitional Council - the commonly referred to UAE proxies). The STC is subservient to the West, willing to join the Abraham Accords and generally represents a complete reversal of geopolitical stances from the days of the PDRY.

I also found a video documentary on YT about the PDRY from a leftist and anti-imperialist stance (I am not familiar with the “HistoryOfSocialism”/“Red Star Tribune” channel and the creator(s)’ exact political orientation, however):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ucQ_qAN0mQ