Houthis Aid Al-Shabaab: Drones, Weapons & Training

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SANAA, Yemen — Yemen’s Houthis have supplied Somalia’s al-Shabaab with weapons, drone training and smuggling routes since 2023, according to United Nations monitors and three research organisations.

The findings describe a relationship that has moved from occasional arms sales toward sustained cooperation across the Gulf of Aden.

The Houthis have not commented publicly on the reports. Al-Shabaab has not addressed them.

Hussein Sheikh-Ali, a former Somali national security adviser who directs the Saldhig Institute in Mogadishu, said the two groups now operate a settled arrangement.

“This is no longer ad hoc, it is a functional strategic partnership governed by mutual utility rather than formal treaties,” he told the Somaliland news website Geeska in February.

Sheikh-Ali said al-Shabaab members had received training in Yemen on drones and explosives, and that Houthi personnel had visited al-Shabaab’s Galgala stronghold for exchanges on asymmetric warfare. Joint financial ventures in Somali extractive industries were documented in his institute’s findings, he said.

A United Nations Panel of Experts monitoring al-Shabaab set out part of the traffic in a report published in November 2025.

The panel said al-Shabaab sent four groups of about 30 fighters each to Yemen.

One group left the Lower Shabelle coast in late October 2024 aboard a Yemeni boat and landed at Hodeidah, according to the report. Those fighters spent about two months training on machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons and explosive devices, it said.

Matthew Bryden, a former UN official in Somalia who directs the Sahan Research and Consulting Center, said the movement runs both ways.

Houthi trainers travel regularly to Somalia’s Bari, eastern Sanaag and Lower Jubba regions, Bryden said. Al-Shabaab coordinates their movements there, along with the smuggling of weapons, ammunition, drone components and explosive devices, he said.

Bryden told the Alhurra television network in a report broadcast on 13 May that there was evidence of expanding Houthi engagement in Somalia since 2023, involving al-Shabaab, the Islamic State group in Somalia and clan militias.

He said al-Shabaab had recruited and sent hundreds of Somali youths to Yemen for ground and naval combat training.

Earlier United Nations monitoring described the ties in narrower terms.

Monitors called the relationship transactional or opportunistic, resting on shared interests in smuggling routes and revenue streams, the Institute for Security Studies wrote in June 2025.

The same monitors recorded that in meetings during 2024, al-Shabaab’s leadership asked the Houthis for advanced weapons and training.

What al-Shabaab does with the technology remains disputed. The group has used drones mainly for propaganda, intelligence and surveillance rather than attacks, the institute wrote.

Taimur Khan, head of Gulf operations at Conflict Armament Research, said his organisation had recorded seizures of first-person-view drone components smuggled into Yemen.

“Conflict Armament Research has not seen FPV drones being used by [al-Shabaab], although it does not mean it has never happened,” Khan said.

Khan said Houthi equipment and components had been traced to Iran and were likely mostly domestically assembled Sammad-series aircraft. The Houthis procure the internal dual-use components themselves and build the airframes in Yemen, he said.

A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report published in March 2025 said Somalia’s porous coastlines had become critical to Houthi access to Iranian supplies of Chinese equipment needed for the group’s drone and missile programme.

The Houthis expanded their own use of the aircraft during attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea that began in 2023.

Luke Zakedis, a Middle East researcher, wrote in the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor on 17 April that cost was what made any transfer consequential.

A Houthi attack drone can cost as little as $10,000 to produce, Zakedis wrote, against the elaborate propellants and components that ballistic missiles and military-grade drones require.

He wrote that if one al-Qaeda affiliate learned to replicate the Houthi approach, others could do the same.

The Islamic State group in Somalia has also experimented with the aircraft. Its first recorded drone strikes, against the Puntland Security Force, were carried out in January 2025, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

In the six months before those strikes, security officials seized five suicide drones and arrested seven people linked to Somalia’s two main armed groups, the Institute for Security Studies said.

Yemen Herald could not independently verify the researchers’ accounts. The organisations differ on how far the cooperation extends, and neither group has confirmed any of the reports.

Sheikh-Ali said each side takes something different from the arrangement.

“For Al-Shabaab, Yemen is the only accessible external source of advanced weaponry — drones, IED technology, naval mines — and a rear base for training when pressure in Somalia intensifies,” he said.

“For the Houthis, Somalia offers a low-governance coastline to … establish alternative smuggling routes and project influence into the Horn of Africa,” Sheikh-Ali said. He described the arrangement as capability swapping between two sanctioned actors rather than ideological solidarity.

Moses Okello, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said the prospect alone carries diplomatic weight, and that insurgents holding such weapons may be less willing to join political talks.

Timothy Walker, a maritime researcher at the same institute, said governments in Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya would have to spend more on air defences.

Assault rifles remain the main weapon smuggled into the region, the institute said. Okello said offensive drones had not taken root in Somalia, though al-Shabaab was said to be adding payloads to commercial models.