The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated Abdulwali Al-Jabri and Al-Jabri General Trading Company – Salalah for their support of terrorism. The designation comes in response to Al-Jabri’s role in facilitating the recruitment and transfer of Yemeni civilians to Russian military units fighting in Ukraine in exchange for money—an activity that has become a new source of revenue for the Houthi group.
On December 5, 2024, ARIJ published an investigative report titled “Yemeni Gulag in Russia: Yemeni youth forcibly fighting on the Ukrainian front” by journalist Najm Al-Dain Qasem, which traces the recruitment of Yemenis to fight in Ukraine for the Russian army, coordinated by the Al-Jabri Company for General Trade and Investment. This company exploits Yemeni youth with promises of job opportunities in Russia, but once they arrive, they are taken to training camps for a few days before being pushed to the front lines of the battlefronts.
In early March 2025, the United States designated several Houthi leaders as terrorists, following the re-designation of the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). According to a report by the U.S. Mission to Yemen, “Houthi leaders have devised numerous revenue-generating schemes to enable their attack campaign, often at the expense of Yemen’s most vulnerable populations. In one such effort, individuals acting on behalf of the Houthis operated a lucrative human smuggling operation, recruiting Yemeni civilians to fight for Russia in Ukraine, often under false and misleading pretenses.”