Over 100 al-Shabaab Fighters Trained in Yemen by the Houthis

SOMALIA · SECURITY

More than a hundred al-Shabaab fighters have crossed the Gulf of Aden to train under Yemen’s Houthis, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. The corridor that carries a tenth of the world’s shipping now doubles as a training route for East Africa’s deadliest insurgency.

What the Journal found

The Wall Street Journal reported that cooperation between al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that has fought Somalia’s government for nearly two decades, and the Houthi movement that controls northern Yemen has been developing since at least 2023. Somali intermediaries built the channel, arranging weapons purchases, the movement of military supplies and contacts with Houthi commanders.

US and regional security officials cited by the Journal said more than 100 al-Shabaab fighters had travelled to Yemen for instruction, including drone operations, advanced weapons handling and explosives techniques. One group reportedly spent three months in Saada, the Houthi heartland in northern Yemen, learning to assemble drones and fly first-person-view systems. Houthi instructors also travelled in the opposite direction to train al-Shabaab personnel inside Somalia.

A Houthi delegation was reported to have visited Jilib, the town in Somalia’s Middle Juba region that functions as al-Shabaab’s de facto capital, for talks on weapons, training and wider cooperation.

The brokers who built the bridge

The Journal identified Jibril Yahya Ali, a Somali known as Gacaamey, roughly “one-armed”, as a longtime liaison between the two groups. He bought military-grade weapons from the Houthis and smuggled them to al-Shabaab, and the Houthis gave him a furnished apartment in Sanaa and a Yemeni passport under an assumed name.

Jibril was killed on February 12 in a missile strike near Al-Ghaydah in eastern Yemen while driving along the coast. Two American sources told the Journal that the United States carried out the strike; US Central Command said it was not a military operation, and the CIA declined to comment.

United Nations investigators have documented the same relationship from their side. A UN Panel of Experts reported in late 2025 that al-Shabaab sent fighters to Yemen for training in groups of about thirty, and that two Houthi military engineers travelled to Jilib to teach drone modification and weapons maintenance. A Somali intermediary detained in Yemen claimed to have facilitated travel for several hundred Somali nationals — a figure that includes more than trained al-Shabaab fighters.

What is confirmed and what is not

Yemen’s National Resistance Forces, an anti-Houthi formation on the country’s western coast, said this week that Somali al-Shabaab fighters were found among Houthi casualties after fighting there, identified through documents and personal belongings recovered from the bodies. That claim has not been independently verified, and neither the Journal’s reporting nor the UN panels have confirmed Somalis fighting inside Yemen.

The second caveat runs the other way and matters more. There is no confirmed evidence that the Houthis have transferred their most advanced missile or drone systems to al-Shabaab. What is documented is training, small arms and expertise — the knowledge to build and modify, rather than the finished weapons.

That distinction is cold comfort to Somalia’s army and the African Union mission supporting it. An insurgency that can build its own attack drones does not need to import them.

Why the Gulf of Aden corridor matters

Somalia and Yemen face each other across the Gulf of Aden, at its narrowest barely 200 kilometres. The waterway feeds the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Suez Canal beyond it, carrying roughly a tenth of global seaborne trade. Houthi attacks already cut Suez traffic sharply over the past two years.

The same sea is a smuggling highway. Weapons move from Yemen to Somalia by dhow; fighters, money and, reportedly, charcoal and other contraband move back. A working relationship between the two shores lets the Houthis extend their maritime awareness south and gives al-Shabaab a supplier that no UN arms embargo on Somalia can reach.

For Somalia, the timing is poor. The government is fighting al-Shabaab on several fronts while the African Union mission shrinks and foreign funding drains away, and the group’s extortion economy is booming, as we reported in our look at Mogadishu’s property boom and the al-Shabaab tax state. Piracy off the Somali coast, which helps finance the smuggling networks, is back at a ten-year high.

What to watch

The first marker is whether al-Shabaab fields armed drones in Somalia, not just surveillance ones. That would confirm the training is operational.

The second is the Red Sea naval picture. Coalition warships intercept dhows regularly; an uptick in seizures of drone components bound for Somalia would show the pipeline thickening.

The third is the ideological strain. Al-Shabaab is a Sunni al-Qaeda affiliate and the Houthis are Zaydi Shia; the partnership is transactional, and al-Shabaab’s continued ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis’ enemy inside Yemen, could yet break it.

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