On 4 October, Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, went on television from Saudi Arabia to announce a campaign to retake the territory still held by the Houthis and restore state authority across the country. Tens of thousands of government troops are taking part, with the Saudi air force providing cover and striking Houthi targets. The Houthis answered within hours, claiming strikes on Saudi energy facilities, which they framed as retaliation for more than fifty airstrikes on Sanaa and elsewhere.
It would be easy to file this under the familiar heading of Yemen’s civil war resuming. That reading misses what is actually at stake. One of the operation’s central objectives is to recover the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the southern gate of the Red Sea and, since the Iran war shut most of the Gulf, the outlet on which Saudi Arabia’s export strategy came to depend. The offensive is less a bid to win Yemen than an attempt to rescue a bypass. And the way that bypass failed says more about the limits of Saudi energy security than any single battlefield result is likely to.
A detour with a second gate
When the US-Israeli war on Iran began on 28 February and Tehran restricted traffic through Hormuz, Riyadh did what its planners had long prepared for. It pushed crude from the Eastern Province through the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea terminal at Yanbu. Abqaiq, which processes up to 7 million barrels a day, began sending most of its output west. By September, roughly 70 per cent of Saudi crude exports were being funnelled through Yanbu.
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