Saudi Arabia is preparing a ground offensive, led by Yemeni troops under Saudi oversight and possibly more than 100,000 strong, to take back the Bab el-Mandeb strait from Yemen’s Houthi movement, which seized the Red Sea’s southern gateway last month in about a week of fighting, Reuters reported on Friday.
The army Riyadh would send is drawn from the same feuding coalition of Yemeni factions that lost the coast. It would fight without the Emirati armor that carried the government’s last two drives on the strait, in 2015 and 2017, and without the American air strikes that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, asked President Trump for and was refused. ACLED, the conflict-monitoring group, judged on Oct. 1 that a major rollback of the Houthi gains was a “lower-probability outcome” over the next three months.
So far the Houthi grip on the strait has fallen hardest on Saudi Arabia and on Yemenis, not on world shipping. Since the group banned Saudi vessels on July 20, only one Saudi-linked tanker has made the passage, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, while overall traffic has stayed above its January level and the big container lines are sailing back toward Suez. In government-held Yemen, 74 percent of households in areas aid agencies can reach cannot meet their basic food needs, the World Food Programme said on Friday, the highest share recorded this year.
The last time the strait changed hands by force, in 2015, an assault led by Emirati armor took it. The war around it ran seven more years and ended in a truce that left the Houthis in Sanaa.
Seven days on the coast
The Houthi offensive opened on Sept. 3 with diversionary attacks, according to a policy brief from the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies. Mocha, the port meant to be the government’s barrier on the coast, fell on Sept. 10. The next day Houthi fighters took Dhubab on the mainland, the Hanish islands to the north and Perim, also called Mayun, the island that splits the strait into two channels. “Boats carrying armed Houthi fighters reached Mayyun Island after government forces withdrew from it yesterday,” a local official told Agence France-Presse.
The coast had been held by the National Resistance Forces of Tariq Saleh, a nephew of the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and the deputy head of the Presidential Leadership Council, which runs the internationally recognized government. Mr. Saleh described the pullback as a “tactical withdrawal” to regroup.
Mohammed Al-Qadhi, a Yemeni journalist, wrote in New Lines Magazine that the Golden Arrow operation, which he described as Emirati-led, needed about 16 days in January 2017 to reach Mocha, and that the Houthis took the same ground back in roughly seven. He counted more than 700 Houthi and more than 500 government fighters killed, citing health ministry reports, and wrote that Mr. Saleh’s force of about 50,000 had effectively disappeared from the coast. “The problem was that the anti-Houthi forces were never a single army,” he wrote.
Ibrahim Jalal, a Yemen analyst, called the collapse “command failure, not combat defeat.” He wrote that the Houthis used hacked channels and an A.I.-cloned voice to send false withdrawal orders to government units. Mr. Saleh’s military media office said a recording of his voice that circulated during the fighting had been faked. That could not be independently verified.
The push was visible weeks ahead. In mid-August, Mohammed Albasha, a Yemen analyst who runs the Basha Report, posted that Houthi forces were building up from Hudaydah and western Taiz toward Mocha and the approaches to the strait.
Houthis Are Making a Push to Capture Bab al Mandab Strait
Houthi military activity is building along Yemen’s southern Red Sea front, with movements stretching from Hudaydah and western Ta’izz toward Mocha and the approaches to the Bab al Mandab Strait.@NRFYemen reported that…
By the Al Jazeera Centre’s count, the Houthis took about 5,400 square kilometers, some 2,100 square miles. Their message to shippers was narrow. Maritime navigation, the group said, was “safe for all companies except for Saudi vessels,” NBC News reported.
The decade before
Houthi fighters and forces loyal to the former president took the strait in March 2015, in the advance that drew Saudi Arabia into the war. On Oct. 1 of that year, government loyalists said they had recaptured it along with Perim. A paper by Shaul Shay, published by Reichman University in Israel, lists the column that did it: Emirati self-propelled howitzers, a battalion of mine-resistant vehicles, a company of Emirati Leclerc tanks and Saudi and Bahraini mechanized units. It met little resistance on a 160-kilometer drive from Aden.
Yemeni brigades pushed north again in January 2017 and took 75 kilometers of coast, including Mocha and Dhubab, according to a situation assessment by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. The next prize was Hodeidah, the largest port in Houthi hands. The Saudi-Emirati coalition ordered a halt to that assault in November 2018 under international pressure, and the U.N.-brokered Stockholm Agreement froze the Hodeidah front the next month. The International Crisis Group credited the accord with staving off a likely famine.
The wider war went the same way. Operation Decisive Storm, launched in March 2015, never returned the government to Sanaa. The U.N. Development Program projected that the war would have killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, about 60 percent of them from hunger, disease and other indirect causes. A truce in April 2022 froze the front lines, and Saudi-Houthi talks under U.N. mediation went on without a settlement.
Outside powers fared no better at sea. Between November 2023 and mid-2025 the Houthis attacked more than 100 commercial ships they described as tied to Israel or its allies, Al Jazeera reported. Operation Rough Rider, the American bombing campaign that began in March 2025, cost more than $1 billion, and two U.S. officials told NBC News it never dealt the group a crippling blow. It ended on May 6, 2025, in a ceasefire brokered by Oman.
Then the anti-Houthi side split. In December 2025, forces of the Southern Transitional Council, backed by the United Arab Emirates, moved to take control across the south and east. Saudi air strikes stopped them in January, and Emirati forces and personnel left Yemen, according to a Congressional Research Service report in May. The kingdom was left as the principal Arab power in the country.
The truce came apart this summer. In July the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing Sanaa’s airport, and on July 20 they declared a ban on Saudi shipping in the strait. On Sept. 8, Houthi missiles and drones struck southern Saudi Arabia, setting fires at oil facilities and wounding 73 people, NPR reported.
What Riyadh is weighing
Reuters cited six people with knowledge of the preparations, including Gulf and Yemeni officials and Western diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. They described two options: a narrow attack on the area around Bab el-Mandeb, or a broader assault with synchronized attacks in the governorates of Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf. Their estimates of the start ranged from within a week to after the American midterm elections on Nov. 3. Riyadh has concluded that it cannot enter new peace talks while the Houthis hold the strait, the Western diplomats and a Gulf official said. Spokespeople for the Saudi and Yemeni governments, the Houthis and the U.S. military did not immediately respond to Reuters.
Washington is providing military advisers and intelligence, including targeting information for Saudi air operations, one Western diplomat told Reuters, which added that the support may stop there. Prince Mohammed called Mr. Trump twice on Sept. 10 to ask for American strikes on the Houthis, and Mr. Trump turned him down, Axios reported, citing two U.S. officials. About 200 American troops were already in Saudi Arabia in a support role, and Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, flew to the kingdom that day, The Times of Israel reported, citing Axios.
Washington also kept a line open to the other side. American diplomats met Houthi representatives, among them Mohammad Abdulsalam, who is under U.S. sanctions, at the U.S. Embassy in Muscat, Oman, on Sept. 13, Reuters reported. The Houthis said they had no intention of attacking American vessels and remained committed to their 2025 ceasefire with the United States. The State Department declined to confirm the meeting.
Pakistan and Turkey have supplied equipment. Reuters described their joint defense pact with the kingdom as signed last month, while Al Jazeera reported its signing in Mecca on Aug. 7. Pakistan flew four cargo planes of air defense systems, light artillery, drones and anti-drone systems into Aden last month and has 30,000 to 40,000 troops inside Saudi Arabia for border defense and missile and drone interception, a Pakistani official told Reuters. Islamabad has not decided to send troops into Yemen to fight. Turkish drones that Saudi Arabia bought before the war have flown over Yemen, and France has said it will send defensive systems and troops to protect the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
Michael Ratney, a former American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told Reuters he expected a narrow operation, far smaller than the 2015 intervention, aimed at retaking coastal areas and restoring normal traffic.
As much they want to vanquish the Houthis completely, they also need to get back to status quo ante before Houthis controlled territory along Bab el-Mandeb
The forces on the ground
On Thursday the Houthis attacked across the front lines in Taiz governorate, and government forces held their positions and said they had inflicted heavy losses, Al Jazeera reported. Rashad al-Alimi, the head of the Presidential Leadership Council, called a general mobilization on Sept. 25. Abdul Basir al-Bahr, a senior official in the Taiz military command, told Al Jazeera the effort, which recalls and retrains reservists alongside local fighters and volunteers, was at an early stage. Field commanders said it had not yet sent reinforcements to the front.
Mr. Albasha, speaking to Reuters, doubted those forces were ready for more.
Many anti-Houthi forces are still not organized or prepared for the kind of sustained offensive required to push back a disciplined Houthi military force. And they are being tested right now, as the Houthis apply pressure across several fronts at once
Nobody agrees on the numbers. ACLED put Houthi strength at about 350,000 fighters, the figure Yemeni officials gave in 2024, against an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 for the government army. Al Jazeera cited about 250,000 Houthis against 300,000 government troops. Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera the Houthis were “a fighting force that is probably more advanced than the force that the Saudis were fighting against about a decade ago.”
Ali Shihabi, a Saudi political analyst close to government thinking, told Reuters that the priority so far had been to defend positions and stabilize the front, “but certainly they will be going on the offensive.” He added, “Success greatly depends on the quality of the performance of the local forces.”
Weighing the offensive
The best case for Riyadh is that the Houthis have stretched onto ground that favors their enemies. The Al Jazeera Centre’s brief said the group must now hold fixed positions on the flat, exposed Tihama coast, at the end of a supply line of about 300 kilometers from Hodeidah, with no real navy. Perim, it noted, depends on supplies running through Dhubab, and Mocha is not a traditional Houthi base.
the coastal advance may ultimately prove to be a tactical gain but a strategic trap.
The fighting since bears out part of that. The Houthis have not taken the high ground over the strait in the Kahboub mountains, Al Jazeera reported on Thursday, and government forces said they captured Mount Zalat, a peak near Kahboub, on Sept. 22, according to Al Jazeera. Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House, told the network, “It is impossible for the government to regain momentum unless it manages to reclaim Bab al-Mandab.”
The case against is the record of the forces involved. ACLED’s analysts wrote that “fragmentation and uneven coordination make a large-scale reconquest difficult.” Mr. Jalal wrote that recovery “will need unified command, ground operations, and sustained fires, not just the air strikes under way.” The Houthis said 450 air strikes hit them in the week of the coastal offensive, all after the government withdrawal, Mr. Al-Qadhi reported. The strikes did not reverse it.
Set against that record, the narrow option is the one with precedent behind it. The 2015 drive from Aden and the 2017 push to Mocha both took the coast, and both leaned on Emirati armor and planning that left Yemen with the U.A.E. last winter. The broad option would ask factions that, by every account of September, failed to coordinate on one front to attack on four at once. A decade of fighting inland, from Decisive Storm to Rough Rider, has not shown air power alone moving the Houthis off ground they chose to hold.
What the strait costs
About 12 percent of global trade passes through Bab el-Mandeb, Al Jazeera reported. The last Houthi campaign showed what disruption does: oil flows through the strait fell from 9.3 million barrels a day in 2023 to 4.1 million in 2024, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. This year the Red Sea became Saudi Arabia’s exit. With Hormuz effectively closed by the Iran war, crude exports from Yanbu rose from 800,000 barrels a day in February to 3.8 million in July, according to Windward, a maritime analytics firm.
Those Saudi cargoes are the ones the Houthis stopped at the strait. Only one Saudi-linked tanker has transited Bab el-Mandeb since July 20, Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported. Windward counted 14 Saudi-flagged ships sent around the Cape of Good Hope instead, each detour adding 10 to 14 days and $900,000 to $1 million, about $13 million to $14 million in all. Much Saudi crude went north instead: Suez crude tanker transits averaged 67 a week between the ban and mid-September, up from 53 in January and February, Lloyd’s List said.
Insurance followed. Indicative war-risk premiums rose to about 0.75 percent of a ship’s value after the Saudi ban, from about 0.3 percent before it, Reuters reported in July. Marcus Baker of the broker Marsh put the rate for a Bab el-Mandeb transit at 0.5 percent of hull value, against 0.1 percent for ships calling at Saudi Arabia’s west coast without passing the strait, S&P Global reported. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institute, estimated the extra cost at roughly $1 million a vessel for each round trip.
Then the bypass itself was hit. Drones struck pumping stations on the East-West pipeline that feeds Yanbu around Sept. 10. Riyadh blamed drones launched from Iraq, while Kpler, the commodities data firm, attributed the strikes to Houthi forces. About 4.5 million barrels a day of crude had been leaving Yanbu before the attack, and none had loaded there from Sept. 11 through Sept. 17, Kpler reported. ACLED said the pipeline was shut for 11 days. Loadings have resumed at reduced rates, Lloyd’s List reported on Oct. 1.
The day Perim fell, ship crossings through the strait dropped to 15 from 30 the day before, according to preliminary Kpler data reported by The National. Brent crude ended that week at $104.60 a barrel. Windward posted that morning that the strait’s narrowest point was now under Houthi control.
🚨 BREAKING: Houthi forces have taken Perim Island. The Bab el-Mandeb is 20 km wide at that point.
Mokha and the Hanish Islands fell on September 10. Perim fell this morning. Yemen’s Red Sea coastline is now Houthi-held end to end, and the strait’s narrowest point is under their…
Some of the bill lands far from the Gulf. Fuel prices in Ethiopia, which moves 90 percent of its trade through Djibouti, have risen 63 percent since April, and in Somalia fuel has gone from 60 cents to $1.50 a liter, according to the Africa Center. Those increases reflect the Hormuz closure as well as the Red Sea.
The case against alarm
The container lines are coming back. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd said on Sept. 14 that four more of their services would move from the Cape route to Suez, and Maersk called the canal route “the fastest, most sustainable and most efficient way to serve customers.” The Premier Alliance of ONE, HMM and Yang Ming, the last big holdout, is moving its first Asia-North Europe service back, and 140 container ships with a little over two million TEU of capacity have switched to Suez since May, the consultancy Linerlytica said, The Loadstar reported. The Suez Canal earned $567.1 million in August, up 56.7 percent from a year earlier, Osama Rabie, the chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, said.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 290 transits of Bab el-Mandeb in the week to Sept. 27, a preliminary figure, and a four-week average of 280, below the tanker-driven peak of 316 a week in June but above the 257 of January, according to its Oct. 1 brief. The baseline that matters to shipowners is older: August transits were still 49 percent below 2023 levels, the firm’s Sept. 18 brief said.
Red Sea is still far away from a full recovery, but it is undeniably under way.
The attacks themselves have been aimed. ACLED counted 10 commercial ships attacked between July 13 and Sept. 25, at least six of them hit and seven Saudi-flagged or Saudi-owned. Four crew members were killed aboard the Tihama on Aug. 11. ACLED found no corroborated attack on shipping since Aug. 24 and judged the restraint “tactical, intended to limit the risk of broader international intervention.”
Restraint is a Houthi choice, and that is the strongest objection to the reassuring numbers. Mr. al-Muslimi told Al Jazeera that “the Houthis do not need to control it as long as they besiege it.” ACLED warned that “significant uncertainty remains over which vessels the Houthis may consider Saudi-linked.” Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London, told NBC News that holding Mokha, Dhubab and Perim would not give the group “sovereign control of the entire strait,” but that such control would “constitute an extraordinary shock to the global trading system.” Protection is already thin: merchant ships are effectively queuing for escorts from the European Union’s Aspides naval mission, which lacks the warships to meet demand, Lloyd’s List reported, citing Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief. On the evidence of September, the Houthis are running a selective blockade, not a closure, and the cost to everyone but Saudi Arabia rests on their keeping it selective.
The people in between
Yemen imports about 90 percent of its food. Nationwide, 18.3 million people face severe food insecurity, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children under 5, the W.F.P. said on Friday. In government-held areas, home to about 10 million people, the share of families going short is the worst the agency has recorded this year.
Matthew Hollingworth, an assistant executive director who runs the agency’s program operations, told reporters in Geneva by video from Rome that the escalation threatened to be “absolutely devastating” for food security.
We are looking at a hunger crisis that is going to grow as it persists.
More than 149,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen, many more than once, according to the International Organization for Migration, which counted 46,000 on Sept. 11. More than 3,700 crossed the strait to Djibouti by late September. Families are reaching the outskirts of Aden and Taiz without food or water. The W.F.P. says it needs $109 million to reach as many as 1.5 million people and has already diverted supplies meant for November.
What comes next
The Houthis kept up their attacks in Taiz this week, and the government army has claimed 1,540 Houthi casualties, a figure that could not be independently verified. Prince Mohammed has pledged a firm response to the group’s attacks on the kingdom. The officials who spoke to Reuters put the start of the offensive anywhere from within days to after the Nov. 3 midterms.
Full repairs to the East-West pipeline were estimated at four to six weeks from mid-September, according to Kpler. Lloyd’s List Intelligence has moved its Red Sea brief to every two weeks. The W.F.P. said displaced families would face aid shortfalls within a month without new money.
The first Premier Alliance ship sent back through the canal, the ONE Continuity, is scheduled to leave Laem Chabang, Thailand, on Oct. 19 and reach the Suez Canal on Nov. 9, six days after the midterms.