Semafor's Sloppy Propaganda Piece on Yemen

The ignorance of basic details about the Houthis confirms that it is just a sloppy bit of propaganda.

Semafor has published a silly article hyping the Houthi threat to Israel and the U.S. One sign that they don’t know much about their subject is this lousy summary of the group’s background:

The Houthis emerged from southern Yemen [bold mine-DL] as a potent military force in the early 2010s following the toppling of the country’s long-standing dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The militia’s members, who largely adhere to a sect of Shiite Islam, subsequently overthrew Yemen’s Saudi-backed government in 2014 and gained control over much of the Yemeni military’s hardware, including missiles, tanks and air assets. The Houthis used them to gain control over most of northern Yemen in 2016 [bold mine-DL].

If there is one thing that anyone should know about the Houthis, it is that they are definitely not from the southern part of the country. Their power base is in northwestern Yemen, and they are loathed and fiercely opposed in the south. The old Zaydi imamate that ruled in north Yemen for centuries had it roots in the same territory.

The Semafor account of recent history gets the geography and some of the important events backwards.