Saudi Arabia’s offensive against the Houthis aims to secure Bab el-Mandeb - opinion

Early in September, the Houthis launched a rapid and unexpected offensive along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. They captured the strategically important port of Mocha and pushed south toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, gaining roughly 150 km. of coastline and threatening the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

The offensive turned Bab el-Mandeb into a second maritime pressure point in Iran’s conflict with the United States. Before it, US naval and military resources could concentrate on the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s principal economic lever.

The Houthi advance put the Red Sea route into play as well, giving Iran potential leverage over both of the region’s main oil-shipping corridors.

Oil prices are determined at the margin, so even when actual lost production is relatively small, the mere threat of disruption can produce a large price increase. That is exactly what happened in September.

Brent crude, the principal international benchmark price for crude oil, had averaged about $89 per barrel for most of 2026. After the seizure of Mocha, despite there not yet being an equivalent actual loss of global oil production, it went above $110. It now sits just below $110.

The Houthi assault was too vitally significant to go unanswered. On October 4, the internationally recognized Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, launched a major counter-offensive. With substantial Saudi air and naval support, government forces attacked the areas recently gained by the Houthis.

In its public statements, the Yemeni government has emphasized that its long-term aim is national reunification. Accordingly, when Rashad al-Alimi, president of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), announced the operation on October 5, he described it as an effort to restore state institutions, retake Sanaa, and defeat the Houthi movement. Probably more in hope than expectation, he dubbed it “Operation Dawn of Yemen.”

Reuters suggested that Saudi Arabia’s more immediate strategic requirement is to recover the Bab el-Mandeb area and remove the leverage the Houthis acquired in September.

Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Michael Ratney, put that narrower objective succinctly: “Ideally, it would be a fairly limited operation to retake coastal areas and get back to normal maritime traffic.”

The coalition’s military effort is considerable. Its spokesman Major General Turki al-Maliki said that 100 fighter aircraft participated in the opening phase, and that 324 “high-value targets” had been destroyed.

The coalition also announced round-the-clock support for Yemeni ground forces and air cover over Bab el-Mandeb, while naval operations have extended north to Hodeidah governorate.

The coalition said it struck weapons depots and facilities storing explosive-laden boats and naval mines, and thwarted a planned attack on southern Red Sea waterways.

The Houthis origins

Who are these Houthis, who call their movement Ansar Allah and are perhaps the most blatantly antisemitic of all jihadist groups? They brandish a flag inscribed with the words: “A curse on the Jews”, in addition to such slogans as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

They emerged in the late 1980s from within Yemen’s Zaydi Shi’ite communities in the northern Saada region. The current conflict stems back to the sadly misnamed “Arab spring” uprisings of 2011. Inside Yemen, they resulted in mass protests against the long dictatorial rule of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Saleh was forced to step down in favor of his vice-president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. In 2015, Hadi tried to sponsor a revised constitution for Yemen that envisaged a federal system split between northerners and southerners. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels rejected it.

Although the Houthis are fundamentalist Shi’ites, Yemen’s ex-president Saleh, a Sunni Muslim, decided to collaborate with them in a bid to return to power.

It was through Saleh that the Houthis were able to gain control of most of the Yemeni military, including its air force. As a result, and supported with military hardware from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they overran large tracts of the country and in September 2014 captured Yemen’s capital city, Sanaa. Subsequently, they expanded their control across much of northwestern Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, alarmed at the prospect of Iran gaining a foothold on the Arabian peninsula, formed a coalition to support Hadi’s government, and intervened in March 2015 to beat back the Houthis. The internal struggle for power has continued ever since, and despite years of coalition air operations and ground fighting, the Houthis have retained their north-western power base.

A UN-brokered truce in April 2022 substantially reduced the fighting. Although it formally expired in October that year, the UN acknowledges that relative restraint had continued until the present escalation.

The Houthis’ conflict with Saudi Arabia has been both religious and political. Zaydis opposed the spread of Saudis’ Sunni Wahhabi influence on religious grounds. It was the Saudis’ political and military influence in Yemen that the Houthis resisted.

From 2022, Riyadh cut back substantially on its own military activity, attempting a policy of support for the PLC by way of diplomacy. Even so, it continued to fund and arm anti-Houthi forces. In the past year, it has increasingly reasserted direct military involvement, culminating in its current support for the offensive against the Houthis.

Although the ground fighting is being conducted primarily by Saudi-backed Yemeni forces rather than Saudi troops, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been a significant driver of the counter-offensive.

Following the Houthi advance toward Mocha and Bab el-Mandeb in September, he personally pressed US President Donald Trump to strike them. Trump declined direct US participation, but Washington subsequently provided intelligence and targeting support.

MBS’s likely strategic objectives are to restore the Red Sea security buffer by pushing the Houthis away from Bab el-Mandeb and the Saudi-facing Red Sea coast. He is probably not at one with the PLC in seeing the conflict as another attempt to win the Yemeni civil war.

The rapid Houthi gains were a serious setback to the Saudi-backed Yemeni order. Reversing them, even partially, demonstrates that Saudi Arabia can still defend the security of its southern frontier.

MBS’s immediate strategic calculation is probably to deny the Houthis – and by extension Iran – a durable position at Bab el-Mandeb, protect Saudi maritime and energy interests, restore Saudi leverage, and enter any eventual negotiation from a position of strength, backed now by the offer of Egyptian support.

The writer, a former senior civil servant, is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com