On May 10, the president of the political council of the Houthi movement (Ansarullah) in Yemen, Saleh Habra, met the Iranian ambassador in Sanaa, Mahmoud Hassan Ali Zadeh, in a first public meeting between the two sides.

The Houthi movement, which was founded in 1992, takes its name from formal leader Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, who was killed by the Yemeni army in September 2004.

The senior representative of the Houthis in the National Dialogue Conference, Mohammed Nasser al-Bakhiti, confirmed the meeting and told Al-Monitor in a phone interview that the Iranian ambassador had visited Habra in his office in Sanaa.

Anti-Houthi (Yemeni) websites claimed that this is not the first meeting and that there were several secret meetings between Iranian and Houthi officials. They added that the meeting’s aim was to urge the Houthi movement to fabricate a problem as a pretext to withdraw from the National Dialogue Conference, because the dialogue would hinder their plans of the recovery of the Zaydi Imamate’s rule. Al-Karama quoted undisclosed sources that the Iranian ambassador expressed his resentment over tightening Yemeni security that recently prevented smuggling weapons to the Houthi movement.