Washington – Last week, Congressman Darrell Issa (CA-48) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for Ansarallah in Yemen (commonly known as the Houthis), to be redesignated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Rep. Issa’s letter was co-signed by 53 of his GOP colleagues, including Foreign Affairs Chairman McCaul and every Foreign Affairs subcommittee chairman.
The letter, highlighted in an exclusive report on Fox News Digital, notes in detail increasing Houthi terror attacks on shipping vessels and U.S Navy assets in the Red Sea. Issa’s letter also describes the half-measure of the Biden Administration designating the Houthi’s as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) without the imposition of a much stronger designation as an FTO.
An excerpt from the letter:
“As has been widely reported, these attacks threaten the free flow of commerce, endanger innocent mariners, and violate international law. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait accommodates 12 percent of global trade flows, including 30 percent of global container traffic. Predictably, the threat of Houthi bombardment has rerouted much international shipping away from the Red Sea, dramatically slowing the movement of goods that must now be shipped around Africa and impacting transnational supply chains. Sometimes, the impact is far more tangible as in the case of strikes on U.S.-owned ships.
It is time for a significantly stronger response. An SDGT designation that includes broad exemptions for petroleum, port, and airport-related4 transactions and that will not come into effect for a month – despite the immediacy of the threat and significant congressional interest in redesignation of the Houthis as an FTO at the outset of their campaign – is wholly inadequate and unacceptable. An FTO designation is substantially preferable to a stand-alone SDGT designation. 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.”
The full letter can be found here.
Darrell Issa is the Representative of California’s 48th Congressional District. The District encompasses the central and eastern parts of San Diego County and a portion of Riverside County, including the communities of Fallbrook, Valley Center, Ramona, Escondido, Santee, Lakeside, Poway, Temecula, Murrieta, and the mountain and desert areas of the San Diego-Imperial County line. Issa served as the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform from 2011-2015.
