Canada has added the Houthi militant group to its list of terrorist entities, the government announced Monday.
The Iran-backed group, officially known as Ansarallah, has operated in Yemen since the early 2000s and has contributed to unrest in the Middle East by attacking multiple commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea for over a year.
Those attacks began in November 2023 to protest Israel’s military offensive in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.
Canada supported British and American strikes against Houthi targets earlier this year in response to the Red Sea attacks.
“The terrorist acts perpetrated by Ansarallah in the Red Sea threaten civilian lives and global supply chains, and we stand with the United States in using every tool at our disposal to hold this group and (its) backers to account,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters in Ottawa.
The U.S. listed Ansarallah as a terrorist group in January this year.
The Conservatives called on the government to list the Houthis as a terrorist entity in October.
The listing has “immediate legal and financial consequences,” LeBlanc said.
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Under Canadian law, the designation allows for criminal penalties against any person or group that knowingly deals with a listed entity. Anyone found to be members of a listed entity can be barred from entering Canada.
The order acknowledges the term “Houthi” can also refer to an ethnic group in Yemen, and this designation only applies to Ansarallah militants.
The Houthis have also worked closely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, both of which are also listed terrorist entities in Canada.
The Houthis have more recently targeted Israel directly with missile attacks while stepping up their Red Sea strikes as the Middle East conflict widened to include Hezbollah and Iran. The group has vowed to continue its attacks until Israel withdraws its military forces from Gaza.
The Houthis control much of northern Yemen and have battled for control of the country with the internationally-recognized Yemeni government since 2014. The civil war is one of the deadliest in recent history, with over 150,000 people killed and another 227,000 dead from famine and other indirect causes, according to United Nations estimates.
The Canadian government has been accused by the UN and human rights groups of fueling the civil war by selling arms to Saudi Arabia, which intervened in 2015 at the request of the Yemeni government to battle the Houthis.
A Global Affairs Canada report says Saudi Arabia was the top non-U.S. importer of Canadian military equipment last year, receiving more than $904 million in shipments.
That’s more than twice the amount of equipment sent to Ukraine, the second-highest recipient on the list.
Saudi Arabia topped the list in 2022 as well, receiving over $1.15 billion in military goods and technology.
—with files from the Canadian Press
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