Far from their home base in Yemen’s northern highlands, the Ansarullah movement—better known as the Houthis—has slowly but surely cultivated a role for itself in Iraqi political dynamics. The group’s presence in Iraq serves its core aim of knitting itself as an indispensable thread in the webbing of the Tehran-backed ‘Axis of Resistance’. Ansarullah has also built capacity in Iran, Lebanon, and Oman, ultimately aiming to encircle its arch-nemesis to the north, namely the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since the beginning of the Saudi-led military campaign against Ansarullah in 2015, Baghdad has broadly played both sides of Yemen’s complex diplomatic dynamics. While the Iraq envoy of the Houthis, Ahmad Al-Sharafi, primarily...