More than 50 House Republicans are urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to redesignate the Iran-backed Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, less than a month after the Biden administration applied a less severe designation to the group.
Led by Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), 54 Republican congressmen sent a letter to Blinken arguing that the Houthis’ recent designation as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) “is wholly inadequate and unacceptable.”
“We find it deeply concerning that the Administration once again opted to not designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO),” they wrote in a letter dated Wednesday.
On January 17, the State Department officially listed the Houthis as an SDGT entity but stopped short of deeming the Houthis an FTO. The latest decision came nearly three years after the Biden White House removed the SDGT and FTO designations, which the Trump administration put in place in its final weeks.
Of the two, an FTO designation has much stronger sanctions and restrictions attached, including visa bans and civil liability for terrorist attacks. These penalties, the lawmakers argue, would better prevent the Houthis from carrying out further assaults on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
“It is time for a significantly stronger response,” they said.
“Listing the Houthis as an FTO would provide a right of action to victims of Houthi terrorism, impose visa bans, and apply sanctions widely to non-U.S. persons, while your SDGT designation would not. Likewise, when compared with an SDGT listing, an FTO designation would also reduce the legal threshold for penalizing violators of the resultant sanctions.”
Meanwhile, an SDGT designation “includes broad exemptions for petroleum, port, and airport-related transactions and . . . will not come into effect for a month,” they added.
The Houthis have launched more than 30 attacks on commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since mid November, the Defense Department stated in a news release on Sunday. In response, the U.S. has led various retaliatory strikes against Houthi-controled areas in Yemen in an attempt to disrupt the Iranian proxy’s ability to launch additional attacks.
Issa and the 53 other Republicans, however, said more needs to be done “to restore deterrence, including a stronger SDGT designation, an FTO designation and measures that directly penalize Iran.”
“The Houthis unquestionably meet the threshold for FTO designation, and so, given the forgoing, we believe you should redesignate them as an FTO immediately,” the letter concludes.