The Saudis and Yemen Strike Back
(2pm Eastern Time)
As I write this, Yemen's government is attacking the Houthis along the Red Sea coast. Yemeni troops on the ground. Saudi air power overhead.
Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, announced the offensive on television today and called it the battle for the state, until Yemen is liberated from the Houthis. The stated aim is to retake all Houthi-held territory and restore state authority across the whole country. Government forces say they are striking Sanaa and Saada, the Houthi capital and the Houthi heartland. Heavy ground fighting broke out in the Kahboub Mountains, the high ground overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, with government troops and al-Subaiha tribesmen attacking Houthi positions.
The Houthis still hold the initiative. In the last 48 hours they took strategic hilltops near Taiz and cut the last supply road between Taiz and Aden. Several outlets report Taiz encircled or close to it. That is Yemen's third-largest city, with hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of government troops inside. The Houthis also claimed new missile and drone strikes on Aramco facilities in Riyadh and at Khurais.
Right now, the tactical war is Yemeni soldiers taking back hills, roads and towns. The operational war is the campaign to retake the coast down to the strait. The strategic war is Saudi oil getting from Yanbu to Asia. Riyadh is fighting the third with the first two. They overlap only partly. Yemen can win back a lot of ground and Saudi tankers can still be hiding at the end of it.
Meanwhile, a few days ago, a Saudi tanker loads crude at Yanbu. Then it disappears. Its transponder, the box that broadcasts its identity, position, speed and course, goes silent. Somewhere to the south, maybe, it slips through Bab el-Mandeb. Maybe.
Every other ship in the Red Sea sails lit up. Container ships, bulk carriers, tankers from everywhere else. Lloyd's List counted 290 transits through Bab el-Mandeb the week of September 21 to 27, more than the week before. Lines that avoided the Red Sea for years are coming back. The Houthis have told the industry that navigation is safe for everyone except Saudi shipping. Everyone else believes them. Only the Saudis need to turn their transponders off.
Officially, exactly one Saudi-linked tanker made the passage between the July 20 blockade and mid-September. That number counts the ships willing to be seen. The dark ones never show up in it. A Saudi tanker that has to switch off its identity to use a lane everyone else uses openly is living under Houthi rules.
Let’s review. On September 10, Houthi forces broke the Saudi-backed salient at Hays, took Mocha and drove south down the coast. That same morning, drones launched from Maysan province in Iraq hit pumping stations on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. That pipeline is the Saudi escape from Hormuz. It had been carrying about five million barrels a day across the kingdom to Yanbu.
September 11. Riyadh shut the pipeline down. The Houthis took the rest of Yemen's Red Sea coast, Perim and the Hanish Islands. In two days Saudi Arabia lost the pipe that carries its oil to Yanbu and the passage that carries it away from Yanbu. Oil went back above 100 dollars a barrel. Baghdad confirmed the Maysan launch site and fired the commander who led operations there. A remarkable occurrence that almost no one reported on.
September 13 and 14. Saudi air power pounded Mocha, Dhubab and the coast around them. The Houthis counted more than 300 Saudi airstrikes across Yemen in five days and fired missiles at the airbase at Khamis Mushait. Government forces claimed ground near the strait. One maritime outlet reported that the Houthis had overextended and left Perim. They hadn't.
September 18. Houthi ballistic missiles and drones reached Riyadh for the first time in this war. Most were intercepted. One got through and set an Aramco fuel depot beside King Khalid International Airport on fire. Black smoke over the Saudi capital. The same night the Houthis claimed a strike on Aramco facilities at Yanbu. Air France canceled its Riyadh flights. Washington warned Americans in the kingdom about sudden escalation.
September 23 to 25. Al-Madani pushed inland, into the mountains of Taiz and Lahj, apparently trying to cut Taiz city off. That push stalled for a while. Government troops and local tribesmen took back Mount Qarfan and other heights, and Yemeni officials started calling it a stalemate. The coast is Houthi. The mountains above it are contested.
September 24. A Greek Patriot battery shot down a missile and a drone over Yanbu. Britain sent a refueling tanker. Europe had arrived far away from the actual fighting. So far, the Houthi offensive is the most effective and well-coordinated military action on the ground by anyone in this regional conflict.
As September came to a close, the pipeline came back at reduced rates. Laden tankers reappeared near Yanbu after weeks running dark. Ships queued for escorts from Operation Aspides, the European Union's naval mission protecting Red Sea shipping, because it did not have enough warships to go around. Mohammed bin Salman had already called Trump twice in one day asking for strikes on the Houthis. Trump came close to ordering one and held off. Advisers, intelligence and targeting information instead.
This morning. After Saudi airstrikes on Sanaa that the Houthis reported Saturday and again today, the Yemeni government announced the offensive involving as many as 100,000 troops. So, now we’ll see what the Houthis can do.
Iran (remember them?) is still winning strategically as long as Hormuz remains commercially unreliable. Now the same logic runs on the other side of Arabia. It is interesting to me that the damage to the Saudi East-West pipeline came from militias attacking from inside Iraq. Not enough people are questioning this.
Who supplies these militias if not Iran? Their drones, components, training and doctrine come out of the IRGC ecosystem. Some random Iraqi faction improvising its way to the single most valuable piece of Saudi infrastructure is hard to take seriously.
Tehran has told allied groups in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to prepare for coordinated action if Iran is attacked again. Coordinated is their word. Tehran itself treats these organizations as a deployable regional network. That is the IRGC in a regional role, the same one it already had with the Houthis and with Hezbollah in Lebanon. What has changed is how much Iran depends on it.
Epic Fury destroyed enormous amounts of Iranian hardware and leadership. Iran can still exert pressure through the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, maritime geography and ambiguity. Foreign assets and surviving networks are doing the work now. The IRGC controls (or at least supports) all of this.
Iraq just got more interesting too, besides the militias themselves. American forces completed their withdrawal on September 30, and the Iran-backed militias publicly celebrated. The withdrawal came after the pipeline attack. It still raises Iraq's value as an arena for Iranian influence.
Iran wants it both ways. Tehran publicly distances itself from the Houthis and the Iraqi militias and suggests Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sit down and negotiate with the Houthis. At almost the same moment it tells those same groups to stand ready. Everybody gets their own mythology. Tehran's is that it has nothing to do with any of this. In a sense they are telling the truth. Iran’s traditional government has apparently become a rubber stamp for the IRGC anyway.
Bab el-Mandeb is choked for one major customer. The Saudis built their whole Hormuz workaround on Yanbu, and Yanbu now works only as well as Saudi tankers are willing to hide. Some loaded lighter and sailed north through Suez instead of south past Yemen. With the pipeline down, even that route shrank. Crude transits through Suez fell to their lowest tonnage since mid-July.
I can find no reported Houthi strike on a ship in the strait since they took Perim. The last confirmed hits on shipping came in August. But that stays on everyone’s mind. If Saudi crude cannot use Bab el-Mandeb without hiding, rerouting, naval escort, insurance penalties or military intervention, the threat is doing its job.
Meanwhile, the Saudis have solidified their own coalition. The Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan Mecca Joint Defence Agreement predates the latest Houthi escalation, and much of the intelligence sharing being celebrated was already agreed. The chiefs' meetings are partly choreography. Pakistani equipment and advisers are the real substance. Large numbers of Pakistani troops helping defend Saudi territory. Turkish drones already in use. The alliance's defense committee meets tomorrow, with the Yemen offensive underway.
Then there is France. Paris has sent ground troops and electronic defensive systems to Saudi Arabia to help protect Yanbu. France is staying out of the fighting in Yemen. Militarily it is modest. Symbolically it has a lot of global prestige. France plants itself beside one end of the Saudi escape route and collects prestige as a security provider.
Saudi Arabia gets a European partner. Again, this happens with little reporting and, shockingly, without any comment from Trump at all. Nothing from the man. He’s never this quiet about anything. As I said long ago, Trump wants this war to go away.
Washington seems comfortable with that division of labor. The United States is supplying intelligence and advisers for the Saudi operation and has refused the direct combat role Riyadh wanted against the Houthis. So Saudi Arabia, Yemeni government forces, Pakistan, Turkey and France are handling pieces of the spillover while Trump keeps framing Epic Fury as an American success. I have not seen him say a word about France. His story has always leaned toward we did it ourselves.
Everybody adapts. Epic Fury stimulated a lot of it.
Inside Iran the contradiction I wrote about earlier is still unresolved. Early support for the country is now pressed by a deteriorating economy and the fact the US is not causing any more damage to the population. The rial is now around 2.688 million to the dollar. Inflation is above 70 percent. That weighs more heavily on Iranian society than American weapons.
The central bank has started selling up to 2 billion dollars in foreign currency to prop it up. Reuters reports the leadership fears renewed unrest and is tightening repression. No January-scale uprising yet. The Guards might be able to outwait Western political patience. They also have to outwait the Iranian economy.
Does wartime nationalism hold once the air war recedes and ordinary Iranians are left with inflation, unemployment, shortages, executions and a stronger IRGC? There was violence in the streets in January with thousands of protesters arrested. It wouldn’t take much to reignite, especially if the US is not killing anyone.
Of course, the IRGC will be ruthless if it happens. Still, the pressure is building.
The talks still resemble a peacock mating dance. Everybody says they want to talk. But, Iran keeps tying Hormuz and the American blockade to negotiations, exactly as it did in June. More mediators, proposals, denials and preconditions. Heavy posturing and strutting. Amazingly, the “100%” defeated IRGC still has a strong hand to play.
The nuclear question has become almost weirdly displaced. Epic Fury (along with Israel’s Lion’s Roar) severely damaged Iran's nuclear capability. I have always counted that as the clearest strategic success of the war, and Israel's most concrete win. This war began over centrifuges. Seven months later the active problems are ships, pipelines, militias, Yemen and Saudi infrastructure. The original object is getting foggy.
So here we are. Iran is still imposing the Hormuz problem. The Houthis are still imposing the Bab el-Mandeb problem.
Saudi Arabia started trying to solve the second one by force today.
Does a Saudi tanker sail south through Bab el-Mandeb with its transponder on? If one does, and then another, the Houthi victory begins evaporating. If they keep running dark, rerouting and waiting while Riyadh fights to clear the coast, the Houthis will have demonstrated strategic leverage without hitting a single one of those tankers.
Can Yemen troops and Saudi air power kick Houthi ass? Do the Houthis even have the missiles/drones to hit a Saudi tanker?
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