Biden admin ends Trump-era Houthi ‘terrorist’ designation

Aid groups said the designation threatened to stifle aid and cripple the economy in war-torn Yemen.

The administration of President Joe Biden has formally delisted Yemen’s Houthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organization” and “Specially Designated Global Terrorists”, undoing the last-minute move under former President Donald Trump that the United Nations and aid groups said threatened to further devastate the war-torn country. The move comes as the Biden administration continues to change tack on the US approach to the war in Yemen, announcing on February 4 that it would end the US support for offensive operations for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition that intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015, a year after the northern-based Houthis kicked President Abdu-Rabbu Mansour out of the capital Sanaa. Aid groups, the UN, and US legislators had decried the Trump administration designations, which froze any US-related assets of the Houthis, banned Americans from doing business with them and made it a crime to provide support or resources to the movement. It went into effect on January 19, a day before Trump’s term ended.