Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has relied on the Red Sea route since the Iran conflict effectively closed Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil used to flow.
CAIRO/WASHINGTON/DUBAI: Iran-aligned Houthis seized control of Yemen’s port city of Mocha on Thursday and advanced down the Red Sea coast to strategic islands, military sources said, hours after President Donald Trump said he expected the Iran war to end after the U.S. midterm elections.
Yemeni government military sources said the Houthis had gained further leverage over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the southern outlet of the Red Sea and one of the world’s most important shipping routes, and had reached the islands of Hanish.
If the Houthis were to gain control of the waterway on the opposite side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz, it could give their sponsor Iran a critical advantage in the war with the United States, reducing supplies through a second major transit corridor and sending oil prices surging.
It would also make it harder for Trump to find an exit from a war that has hurt his Republican Party’s electoral prospects ahead of the November midterms.
Yemen’s Houthi-run humanitarian operations coordination centre said in a statement that Red Sea navigation is safe for all shipping companies except for Saudi vessels.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has relied on the Red Sea route since the Iran conflict effectively closed Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil used to flow.
Houthi spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam said, without elaborating, that the group’s operations were defensive and would stop once attacks on Yemen stopped.
Yemeni government, Iranian and regional sources told Reuters the Houthi advance down the coast this week came with direct guidance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal on Thursday cited U.S. and Middle East officials as saying Iran had resumed producing ballistic missiles from existing components while working in underground facilities.
OIL PRICES JUMP
Brent crude prices jumped as much as 4% on Thursday to $105 a barrel on concern over disruption to supply routes.
The Houthis entered the current war alongside Iran with an attack on Israel in March, but largely stayed quiet before declaring a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in July and stepping up attacks on the south of the kingdom this month.
Tensions in the region remained high, with Saudi civil defence authorities issuing emergency alerts in the southwestern city of Khamis Mushait for the fourth time in 24 hours, as the Houthis attacked.
Pakistan has delivered a Saudi warning to Iran to rein in the Houthis to try to prevent the crisis from spiralling, Saudi, Pakistani and Iranian sources said. A senior Iranian official said Tehran’s response was: “Iran does not control the Houthis”.
The conflict between Saudi Arabia’s Yemeni allies in the internationally backed government and the Houthis follows the biggest declared wave of tit-for-tat attacks on shipping in the Gulf region by the U.S. and Iran this week since the war began with U.S. and Israeli strikes in late February.
Seen as part of a regional alliance known as the “Axis of Resistance” backed by Iran, the Houthis have also rallied behind the Palestinians in the Gaza war, firing drones and missiles at Israel and attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Yemeni government forces and their allies are relocating south along the Red Sea coast to Dhubab, which sits directly on the strait, across from the island of Perim, government military sources said.
Control of Dhubab and the island is key to gaining hold of the strait, they said.
Bab el-Mandeb, or the Gate of Tears, named for its perilous navigation conditions, lies between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea on the African coast, making it a major prize for the Houthis, who control Yemen’s most populous areas and much of the north.
It is one of the world’s most important routes for crude oil and fuel from the Gulf bound for the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, or the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, as well as commodities bound for Asia, including Russian oil.
TRUMP SEES WAR ENDING AFTER MIDTERMS
The war and subsequent increase in fuel prices have helped drive Trump’s popularity to record lows. He said Iran was trying to influence the midterm elections, which will determine whether his Republican Party retains control of Congress.
“I think war is going to end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate to try and affect the election,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
Trump has previously set other deadlines for the war to end.
He told the midterm Republican convention on Wednesday that the U.S. may hit Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a site that hosts two deeply buried tunnel complexes near Iran’s damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
The U.S. and Israel launched military strikes on Iran on February 28 partly on concerns over Tehran’s nuclear programme, which Iran says is only for peaceful purposes.
In recent weeks Washington had cited increasing success guiding tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which carried about a fifth of global oil supplies before the war. But a resumption of fighting this month appears to have set back any such gradual reopening. Just seven vessels transited the strait on Wednesday, half the 10-day average, preliminary ship-tracking data showed.
Meanwhile,Iranian state media said on Thursday the Revolutionary Guards Navy had struck a U.S. unmanned vessel at the entrance to Hormuz.
The US attacked more Iranian oil tankers overnight, with the worsening tensions over control of the Strait of Hormuz sending Brent crude beyond $100 a barrel.
The American military said it “destroyed” five vessels in response to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting one of its warships.
The American vessel “successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks,” Central Command, which oversees US forces in the Middle East, said. “No American personnel were harmed.”
Centcom said it hit four tankers in the Gulf of Oman and one near Kharg Island, which sits within the Persian Gulf and is Iran’s main oil-export terminal.
“American forces directed the crews to abandon ship before the vessels were struck and rendered inoperable,” Centcom said, without clarifying if the ships were carrying oil or were empty.
The US has destroyed at least eight oil tankers since Saturday. It’s unclear what proportion of Iran’s energy fleet that represents.
The latest US strikes probably won’t, on their own, make a big dent in Iran’s ability to delivery crude oil. Only one of the five ships was a so-called very large crude carrier, which can carry 2 million barrels and is the main type of vessel engaged in transporting the nation’s crude to customers in places such as China.
Two of them were Aframax-class tankers, which can carry roughly 750,000 barrels, while the others were smaller ships that transport refined petroleum and gas.
Jordan Attacked
Iranian media said Tehran retaliated by targeting two other US warships and eight oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. There was no immediate confirmation of those attacks or any reports of damage.
The IRGC also fired ballistic missiles at Al-Azraq Air Base in Jordan. The Arab country’s government said it intercepted 18 missiles and another two fell in uninhabited areas.
Diesel pump prices in America reached a record high last week, with the conflict preventing most ships from traversing the Strait of Hormuz and curbing global supplies of energy and other commodities such as aluminum.
“When they try to hit US naval ships, they will get hit themselves,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, when asked about Iran. “The back and forth is pretty straightforward. For every time they do that, or try to do that, they’re going to lose tankers.”
The tit-for-tat strikes underscored the difficulty for the US as it tries to avoid intense hostilities with the Islamic Republic and focuses on squeezing its economy, all in a bid to get Tehran’s leaders to reopen the strait and restart negotiations.
The US is maintaining a naval blockade that is preventing Iran from exporting oil and importing vital goods, and contributing to inflation accelerating to almost 90%. The Iranian rial is weakening heavily and is now down about 20% against the dollar in the past two months, according to bonbast.com, which tracks the currency’s black-market rate.
Trump and his defense officials have repeatedly said Iran’s military is effectively incapacitated, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said the pressure campaign “means that likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart.”
Still, Iran’s leaders believe they can withstand the pressure for at least months, Bloomberg has reported, and keep up attacks on commercial vessels as it seeks to control traffic through the Hormuz strait.
Iran is in talks with Oman for a deal to manage traffic through the waterway. While they are still negotiating, any agreement is likely to state Iran has the right to determine which ships can enter the Persian Gulf and possibly charge fees. The US and its allies would likely oppose any pact that restricts free movement through the strait, which they regard as an international waterway.
Elsewhere, tensions remain high between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen. The Iran-backed group claimed attacks on energy sites in southern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, most of them used for distributing fuel to the domestic market.
Saudi authorities issued air-warning alerts in the southern town of Khamis Mushait on Wednesday, but quickly said the danger had passed. They didn’t report any damage or casualties.