Boats carrying Houthi fighters reached Perim Island in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb on Friday after Yemeni government forces withdrew from it, completing the group’s takeover of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline in roughly eighteen hours.
Nearly every account of it today is a shipping story, and the shipping is real, but the thing sitting underneath the day’s coverage and going largely unsaid is that the strait the Houthis just closed their hand around is the exit for the one Saudi export route that was built specifically so Iran could not reach it.
Saudi Arabia’s answer to the Strait of Hormuz was the East-West pipeline, which moves crude from Abqaiq across the country to Yanbu on the Red Sea. On Thursday, projectiles hit that pipeline. On Friday the kingdom’s Energy Ministry said it had shut the line down as a precaution, and the Houthis took the water the line was built to reach. Both halves of the hedge failed inside forty-eight hours, and the half that mattered most was never actually contested.
Eighteen Hours, and Nobody Fought for It
The sequence is short enough to read in one breath. Al Jazeera reported that the Houthis took Mokha port and Zuqar Island on Thursday after rocket fire and a ground assault run from small boats. On Friday they reached Mayyun, the volcanic rock also called Perim that splits the narrowest stretch of the strait into two shipping lanes, and Euronews reported that government forces had withdrawn from it rather than hold it. The town of Dhubab and the village of Murad went the same day.
Read the verbs in that paragraph. Withdrew. Reached. This was not a siege, and it was not a contested landing against a defended island. It was an evacuation followed by a flag change. A local official told Euronews that the Houthis “have completed their takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb area and Mayyun Island, which is located in the middle of the strait,” which is an unusually flat way to describe losing a chokepoint.
The cost is landing on people who had no say in any of it. The UN migration agency counts more than 500 casualties and roughly 46,000 people displaced since the fighting escalated. Military sources cited by Euronews say over 2,000 government troops are now besieged on the Hanish islands, asking for rescue, food and water, and for the siege to be lifted.
Here is where this site’s position differs from the wire copy: the Saudi-led coalition has been at war in Yemen since March 2015, and the coastline it spent eleven years and an enormous amount of money contesting was surrendered in less than a day without a serious fight. That is not a surprise attack. That is the plain result of an intervention that was always better at bombing than at holding ground, and it should be described that way rather than as a sudden Houthi masterstroke.
The Route That Was Supposed to Be the Safe One
The East-West pipeline has a nameplate capacity of around seven million barrels a day and is the kingdom’s only export route that does not pass through the Strait of Hormuz. That is its entire purpose. With Hormuz under threat through this year’s war, the Saudis had been pushing somewhere between four and five million barrels a day west to Yanbu instead.
Three days ago this site wrote that moving that oil west to get away from Iran had put it inside Houthi range. That was the setup. Friday was the payoff, and it arrived faster than we expected.
CNBC reported that the Energy Ministry shut the pipeline after multiple attacks, without naming who was behind them or saying how badly the line was damaged. Satellite imagery and fire-detection data tell a less careful story: NBC News described a smoke plume running some sixty miles along the pipeline route and fire damage at a pumping station near Al Mesba’ah, and CNN reported the line was struck by projectiles that triggered fires on Thursday.
Saudi crude moving through the Bab el-Mandeb had already collapsed to roughly 400,000 barrels a day in August under the threat alone. The strait did not need to be captured to hurt. It just got captured anyway.
Maritime navigation is safe for all companies except Saudi ships, which have already been banned.
That line is from Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree, and it is worth reading twice. It is not a blockade announcement. It is a tariff schedule with a gun behind it, and it tells you exactly what holding Perim is for: not closing the strait, but deciding who gets through it.
What the Chokepoint Is Actually Worth
The numbers that matter here are not the ones about how much oil passes through on a good day, but the ones about what happens when it stops. US Energy Information Administration data on world oil transit chokepoints puts the shape of it plainly:
- Oil flows through the Bab el-Mandeb fell from about 8.7 million barrels a day in 2023 to roughly 4 million in 2024 once the attacks on shipping began.
- Volumes routed the long way around the Cape of Good Hope rose from about 6 million barrels a day to 9.2 million over the same period.
- A cargo from Yanbu to South Korea takes roughly 24 days through the Bab el-Mandeb and about 54 days around the Cape.
That last one is the whole problem. The reroute exists, which is why this is a price shock rather than a supply cutoff, but thirty extra days of sailing is a cost someone pays, and it is not the militia. Brent settled around $108.68 a barrel on Friday with US West Texas Intermediate near $103.45, the first time crude has been above $100 since mid-May.
The reroute is also not available to every ship. In August this site covered the death of three crew on the Tihamah, the kind of vessel that cannot simply sail around Africa. Older tonnage on thin margins does not have the fuel, the insurance or the schedule slack to take the long way, so it keeps transiting a strait that an armed group now openly sorts by flag. And the Hormuz alternative is no alternative at all, since that route has been effectively at a standstill for much of the year.
Washington’s Answer Is to Help Pick Targets
NBC News reported that President Trump declined Saudi requests for American strikes but agreed to provide military assistance, with the US military helping to develop and coordinate targets inside Yemen, and that Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the escalation twice within 24 hours. Euronews notes that neither the White House nor Riyadh has confirmed the refusal, so treat the “no strikes” half as reported rather than settled.
Take the reporting at face value and it still describes the United States entering a second war by the side door. Helping choose targets inside Yemen is not a lighter form of participation than dropping the ordnance, it is participation with the accountability stripped out, and it is happening while Congress has already pushed the Iran war funding fight into a lame-duck session voters cannot reach. A country that cannot get a floor vote on the war it is already fighting is not going to get one on the war it is quietly joining. If the administration is going to help run a campaign in Yemen, it should have to say so out loud and take the vote.
Andreas Krieg of King’s College London put the shift to NBC News plainly, noting that the important change is that the Houthis are now attacking both Saudi territory and the Red Sea depth behind it. That is the actual escalation. For a decade the group was a problem Riyadh could bomb from a distance and absorb. It is now a party that holds ground on both ends of the kingdom’s energy map and has said in public which ships it will let past.
The question for next week is not whether the Houthis close the Bab el-Mandeb, because closing it earns them nothing. It is what Riyadh is willing to pay, in concessions or in another offensive it has already failed to win eleven times over, to get the exit back.