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Arabia
The Houthis Are Now in The Kill Box
2026-09-19
From a week ago. Many more supporting tweets at the link, but I think these are the critical points.
[HotAir] In Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of...
, one of the countries that borders the other waterway chokehold in the region, the al-Mandeb Strait leading to the Red Sea, the Iran's Houthi sock puppets
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to Americaâ„¢, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
s were surrounded by multiple armed forces in the center of the country, but exploited a weakness in the Saudi Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
n line to the southwest, and made a run for it through the mountains until they reached flat terrain on the coast of the Strait. The Houthis made short work of Mokha, and even took a couple of the channel islands in the Strait itself.

CNN
...formerly the Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for...
's Nic Robertson was downright giddy with excitement to report on how brazen the Houthi maneuver was, and how this meant so much more trouble now for Donald Trump
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons...
 and the Americans.


… some Saudi-backed Yemeni battalions were operating at only around 20% of their strength on paper. The rest? "Ghost names" on military payrolls, soldiers who effectively existed on paper while salaries continued to be collected.

Then came the air-support failure. Yemeni commanders desperately requested air cover as waves of Houthi fighters advanced toward the strategic Red Sea port. One senior Yemeni source says CENTCOM told him the United States was watching the battle closely and that Saudi air support was coming. It never came.

According to CNN's sources, Saudi Arabia conducted not a single airstrike that day despite receiving minute-by-minute updates.

Mocha fell within hours. Perim Island, sitting directly inside Bab el-Mandeb, fell the following day.

CNN's Nic Robertson had visited Perim shortly before it fell.

And here's what makes this even more extraordinary: CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper was in Saudi Arabia for coordination meetings on Thursday. More than 100 U.S. military advisers had already been deployed to the kingdom to provide intelligence and targeting support, as part of a newly established joint command.

Yet the system failed at the moment it mattered. One regional source described it to CNN as a "Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions."

Another problem runs deeper: there is no unified command among Yemen's anti-Houthi forces, and while all of this was happening, MBS called Trump twice, ultimately asking the United States to strike the Houthis directly. Trump refused.

The result: In roughly 36 hours, a force riddled with ghost soldiers, fractured command structures and absent air support lost Mocha and then Perim, allowing an Iran-backed movement to establish itself directly inside one of the world's most important maritime chokepoints.

The Houthis won the ground, but their opponents appear to have helped enormously. https://x.com/amanpour/status/2098798791595847855/video/1

We'll come back to what's going on with each of those fronts in due course, but in order to understand how and why we got there, we have to update on the increasingly deteriorating conditions inside Iran due to Operation Epic Fury, then Operation Economic Fury, and most recently, Operation Economic Outcast, the layering on of increased sanctions on the Iran regime's ability to use its neighbors for backchannel access to the financial system.

Israel's Channel 14 reported from sources inside the regime that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the blusterous blowhard serving as Iran's Parliament Speaker, was caught admitting to others inside the government that the regime won't be able to stand this economic pressure much longer. Here's Dror Balazada:



Iran's currency continues to devalue, and inflation continues to climb higher than oil prices. One account puts the annualized inflation rate at 144 percent.

How are Iranians surviving? The same way the regime is — by putting everything on credit. As long as everyone just borrows from everyone else but no money actually changes hands, it'll work for a while until the food runs out and the banks collapse.

Now let's say you have a car that runs, and you actually have gas. Now all you need is...a road that won't consume your car and the precious little gas you do have.

Water levels are so low in other regions of Iran that the regime has literally drawn all the water out of some of the rivers, which didn't give the fish that remained much of a chance.

For several IRGC and Basij forces, it's getting too hard to get by and still support the regime.

President Trump had no problem admitting last week to disabling or sinking close to 10 Iranian oil tankers loitering in the Gulf because of the blockade in response to Iranian strikes on commercial traffic going through Hormuz. But there was another tanker late last week that got struck.

An Iranian cargo ship took a projectile off Qeshm Island early Sunday. One crew member dead, four wounded, ship on fire, crew evacuated.

Nobody's claimed it. Tehran's blaming a "terrorist enemy." CENTCOM hasn't said a word.

Was it struck by our Navy? Not even President Trump will 'fess up' to this one.

That's not exactly a Shermanesque no, is it? So what's the big deal about this particular ship? It was around Qeshm Island, which is basically Iran's equivalent of a safe harbor. We're technically not supposed to be able to operate that close to the Iranian shore on the water. Air strikes? Sure. Navy? This is an interesting attention-getter by the President.

Many in the American media invested in Trump failure with regards to the Iran war are maintaining the illusion that Iran hasn't really lost anything as far as their military industrial complex, and that they are rebuilding much quicker than ever and will be good as new, free to fulfill a life of religious fulfillment soon enough, to quote Leslie Nielsen's Dr. Rumack in Airplane!

Before the Americans and Israelis opened up on Iran with Operation Epic Fury on the last day of February, Iran was a supplier of Shahed-136 drones to Russia for their war with Ukraine. Now? Iran is begging Russia to supply them with Geran-2's, which is Russia's knock-off clone of the Shahed. Why? Iran no longer has the capacity or money to build them on their own, and they're begging Russia to help.

As for Saudi Arabia, it's been a mixed bag this week. We'll get to their poor performance holding up their part of the containment ring around the Houthis and IRGC advisors in Yemen in a bit, but as far as the pipeline goes, I think there's a bit of a misdirect going on. There are lots of media and speculators invested in Trump's defeat saying the pipeline is all but destroyed, the pumping stations will take between six weeks to six months, with others claiming a years-long delay, and without enough reserves in Yanbu, in a couple weeks, there will be an oil flow disruption that will cause prices to skyrocket.

I'm not buying into the panic. First, the blockade is still in place. Ships are methodically moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Three ships a day more than what currently travels makes up for the seven million barrels going through the pipeline. That's if the oil has to temporarily move entirely via tanker again.

According to satellite imagery after the attack, it looks like there's a bypass section of pipeline just about in place.



Yes, the pumping stations will take weeks to rebuild, but portable pumps can be brought in in the interim. The flow rate will not be the same as before, but oil will still flow. And at the mouth of the pipeline, in Dammam, friction modifiers, which are essentially a polymer mixed in with the crude to help it flow easier through the pipeline, will help compensate for the lack of full pumping capacity at the bypass site.

My hunch is that the pipeline will be flowing, even if at reduced capacity, very soon, with full capacity returning sooner than we think.

As for the Houthi adventure, early in the week, the last remaining functional Iranian terror proxy group, and their IRGC advisors, were getting their heads handed to them by the Yemeni armed forces.

🚨 Iranian IRGC personnel are reportedly being killed alongside the Houthis as Yemeni government forces continue advancing in the strategically critical Al-Jawf front.

Houthis had no air power, and were essentially surrounded.

But then, the Saudis' contingent failed to hold their southwest line, and the Houthis made a run for it. Before the Yemeni forces could react, Mokha and a couple islands had fallen, and everyone already against the war with Iran started the 'all is lost' routine. They assumed that the al-Mandeb Strait had essentially fallen, and that no oil would move at all, and Iran finally had the upper hand.

This obviously was not a great development, but I did not believe for a second that it was the strategic victory for the Houthis, and by extension, Iran, as was reported. Why?

The conditions around Sana'a, where Yemeni forces were systematically taking over former Houthi territory and wiping them out had not changed one bit. Yes, some of the Houthis were temporarily out of harm's way. But where did that leave them? Their backs to the sea, mountains in front of them, and flat terrain that offer very little places to hide. They still have no air power, limited munitions, even though they picked up some of the U.S.-made vehicles the Saudis left behind, but no reinforcements, and no one in Iran coming with the cavalry. It seemed to me all weekend that they were sitting ducks in a defenseless position. Turns out my hunch was right.

Not 24 hours passed before U.S. advisors from Centcom were in Saudi Arabia encouraging, chastising, and providing targeting.



While Saudi forces were regrouping and standing up, the Yemeni forces also reoriented, and resumed the fight against the Houthis now that they were in the 'Kill Box' along the coast.

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