November 26, 2024: The Suez canal blockade by Yemen’s Iran-backed Shia Houthi militia and shipping continues. Ships traveling north in the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal have been under attack by the Houthis since late 2023. The Houthis are at war with Israel and still fire at ships more or less at random, though they contend they only fire on ships serving Israel. So far over 60 ships have been attacked and half of them damaged. Two ships were sunk while two others were boarded by Houthi gunmen and captured. One was later released but the other one is still being held. Four sailors have been killed and eight wounded. Several ships have been hit this month but all have continued to the Suez Canal.

The U.S. Navy sent a carrier task force to launch air strikes on Houthi targets with predictable minor effects. That led to more frequent and aggressive attacks which reduced Houthi activity.

On July 19th, one of the Houthi drones hit a building in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, killing one civilian and wounding several others. The next day, Israel sent F-15 and F-35 fighter-bombers to destroy several economic targets in the Yemen Red Sea port of Hudaydah. This is where weapons arrive from Iran for the Houthis to use against Red Sea shipping. The airstrikes destroyed fuel storage sites as well as port facilities, including the difficult-to-replace ship unloading cranes. If the Israelis leave the port alone this work could take up to a year. The Israelis and other nations are not leaving the port of Hudaydah alone as long as the Houthis are using it.

Yemen’s Shia rebels, led by the Houthi tribe, have used their large stockpile of Iranian missiles to try and block access to the Suez Canal. This capability developed over the last decade as the rebels launched attacks on more distant targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles fired from northern Yemen across Saudi territory to hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also acquired the reconnaissance capability to accurately fire missiles at ships passing through the narrow, 26 kilometers wide, Bab-el-Mandeb straits off southwestern Yemen and force ships to take the longer and more expensive and time consuming route around the southern tip of Africa. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source of income for Egypt, bringing in about $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make such an interdiction possible.

Western nations reacted slowly to this interdiction effort but by the end of 2024 were launching regular airstrikes on Houthis targets, coordinating their efforts with the Israelis and U.S. carrier task forces operation in the region. In October 2024 American B-2 bombers dropped penetrating bombs on Houthi underground facilities, destroying missile stockpiles and headquarters for the rebels. This reduced the number of missiles available. This was seen in lower frequency of attacks. A naval blockade of Yemen was i Yemen was tightened, with more frequent inspection of fishing boats and coastal freighters.

Western warships close to the Yemen shore continue using their defensive weapons to defeat attacks launched from the Yemen coast. The United States currently has several destroyers based off Yemen.

The war in Yemen drags on into 2025 or until Iran decides to halt support for the Houthi. Before the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Iran-backed militias in Lebanon, Iran was under widespread internal pressure from Iranians protesting the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Until 2024 Iran smuggled in more and more weapons. These were not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war but for use against targets designated by Iran. Iran suddenly had its own domestic uprising to deal with back home. The Iranian religious dictatorship held onto power and supported more violence against real or perceived enemies of Iran. The blockade of late 2024 and continuing naval patrols near all Iranian ports is also limiting missile shipments to Yemen.

In early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Houthi Shia rebels for a long time but after that was open about it. Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to seal the deal. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since. This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This concept of nationhood is still looked on with some suspicion by many in the region. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate, or modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.

For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Houthis in the north. The Houthis have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam, a religious leader who was a Houthi. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962. Yemen also became the new headquarters of AQAP/Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists after 2007. Now there is ISIL/Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which was very upset by Iranian/Houthi missile attacks.

By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerate or even support AQAP and ISIL. The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf state, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Shia Houthi rebels were from northern Yemen and controlled the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last decade the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets and in later 2023 and into 2024 that violence escalated.