Ambassador Mohammed al-Hadhrami asks Czech Republic and EU to designate Houthis as a terrorist group
Yemen Herald News 
PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Yemen’s ambassador to the Czech Republic has asked Prague and the European Union to designate the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization.
Mohammed al-Hadhrami made the request in talks with Petr Hladík, head of the Middle East and North Africa department at the Czech Foreign Ministry, the state news agency Saba reported Thursday.
Such a step would tell the group and its Iranian backers that maritime security and the stability of energy markets cannot be held hostage, al-Hadhrami said, according to the agency.
The ambassador said Yemen’s security and the restoration of government control over the whole of its territory were conditions for safe shipping and steady energy supply.
He said the Houthi advance along Yemen’s western coast toward the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the country’s islands threatened the region and international shipping, and not only Yemen.
Al-Hadhrami said the offensive was being carried out at the direction of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and with its direct support. The Houthis reject descriptions of themselves as an Iranian proxy and say they act on their own decisions.
Hladík said the Czech Republic continued to back Yemen’s internationally recognized government and the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Saba reported. He said Prague wanted closer cooperation between the two countries.
The account of the meeting rests on Saba, the news agency of Yemen’s internationally recognized government. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation of the discussion, and the Czech Foreign Ministry has published no account of its own.
The European Union has not designated the Houthis. In February the Council of the European Union widened the criteria for its terrorist list and kept every existing listing in place, without adding the group.
The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have designated the movement. The Netherlands has pressed Brussels to do the same after Houthi attacks on merchant shipping in the Gulf of Aden.
Al-Hadhrami is a former foreign minister of Yemen, appointed to that post in September 2019. He took the oath as ambassador to the Czech Republic before President Rashad al-Alimi and presented his credentials to Czech President Petr Pavel in October 2025.
Hladík has run the Czech ministry’s Middle East and North Africa department since 2018. He was the Czech ambassador to Jordan from 2013 to 2018.
The meeting follows a Houthi offensive that has changed who controls Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. The group took the port of Mocha on Sept. 10 and the next day seized the remaining coast and Perim Island, in the middle of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, according to FDD’s Long War Journal and The National.
The Houthis also took the Hanish Islands, an archipelago in the southern Red Sea north of the strait. The campaign against forces of the internationally recognized government began on Aug. 6, the Long War Journal reported.
Government troops recovered some ground near Bab al-Mandab on Sept. 13, the Yemeni Armed Forces media center said. Yemen Herald could not independently verify that account.
The UN Security Council has met twice in emergency session on Yemen in less than a week. The first meeting, on Sept. 10, followed the fall of Mocha. The second was called at France’s request.
Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, told the Council the country faced “a new and more dangerous phase of war” as a four-year truce collapsed.
Khaled Khiari, assistant secretary-general for the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, said the area in and around Bab al-Mandab had become increasingly volatile as the Houthis advanced, and that the group had reportedly captured several islands in the southern Red Sea.
Fighting has spread across Taiz, Hodeidah, Marib, al-Jawf and al-Bayda, the United Nations said.
UNHCR said more than 100,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen. More than 2,400 of them crossed the strait to Djibouti over four days, the agency said, landing mainly at Obock, Khor Angar, Moulhoule and Godoria.
More than 60 percent of those making the sea crossing were women, children and older people, according to the agency. It listed Hodeidah, Taiz, Lahj, Aden, Abyan, Marib, Al Dhaleh and Shabwah among the governorates where families had been uprooted.
The agency put the cost of meeting the immediate needs of displaced families inside Yemen at about 14 million dollars.
The International Organization for Migration counted 85,818 people displaced by the fighting as of Sept. 13, a rise of about 10,000 in a day.
Bab al-Mandab links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and carries traffic bound for the Suez Canal, the shortest sea route between Europe and Asia. Ships avoiding it must round the Cape of Good Hope.
Perim, which Yemenis also call Mayyun, lies in the strait between the Yemeni and Djiboutian shores.
Grundberg has held the special envoy post since 2021. The truce he referred to took hold in 2022 and had survived in weakened form until this year.
Al-Hadhrami was vice minister of foreign affairs in 2018 and deputy chief of mission at Yemen’s embassy in Washington from 2016 to 2018. He represented Yemen on the executive boards of the UN Development Programme, the UN Office for Project Services and the UN Population Fund between 2008 and 2012.
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