Houthis gain ground on Bab el-Mandeb, halt Saudi energy facilities

The narrowest point between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden has once again become a front line. According to Bloomberg, the Washington Post and NPR, which carries an Associated Press dispatch, Houthi forces have pushed south along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, gaining ground around the city of Mokha and the island of Mayyun, which lies at the center of the Bab el-Mandeb strait.

The second front is Saudi territory. Missile and drone attacks have forced the kingdom to shut down some energy facilities. On September 8 a series of attacks injured more than seventy people and sparked fires at oil facilities and service infrastructure in the south of the country, in the cities of Abha, Jazan, Najran and Khamis Mushait. This is the toll reported by the three sources cited above, which trace back to correspondents’ reports and a wire dispatch: we do not have, in this dossier, an official Saudi statement confirming it point by point.

The sequence has a recent history. In July, after Riyadh had shifted part of its crude oil exports to the Red Sea route, the Houthis had struck two tankers carrying Saudi oil. The 2022 truce, which had largely halted fighting between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition, ended with this escalation.

The movement’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, claimed the line being followed: “every aggression against our country and our people will be met with a firm response” (transl. from English). This is a partisan statement, and should be read as such: it does not describe what happened, but the framing through which the attacking side presents it.

Why the strait matters beyond Yemen

Bab el-Mandeb is not a local theater. In its September report on the oil market, the International Energy Agency recorded that in August world production fell to 100.1 million barrels per day, 1.6 million less than the previous month, and that more than 10 million barrels per day of Gulf production remain shut in due to security risks. The same document revises 2026 estimates downward: world supply at 100.7 million barrels per day, 1.3 million less than the previous report, and demand down by 2.5 million barrels per day, about 940 thousand more than the August estimate.

The link between these figures and the advance on Bab el-Mandeb must be handled with caution: the sources available to us today report the revision and the production halted for security reasons, but do not allow us to attribute to the agency an explicit indication of the strait attacks among the causes of the revision. We state this because the difference between an accounting and an explanation is the entire informational content of this passage.

More than 10 million barrels per day of Gulf production remain shut in due to security risks.

The effect can be seen in the market price: on September 10 Brent crude surpassed the threshold of 105 dollars a barrel, according to data reported by Forbes Italia. For Saudi Arabia the problem is twofold: the facilities hit are production facilities, and the alternative route westward passes exactly where the Yemeni movement is advancing.

What we do not know

A great deal, and it is worth listing. Today’s dossier does not contain a quantification of the ground gained, nor the date on which the positions around Mokha and Mayyun would have changed hands, nor the identity or number of the Saudi energy facilities shut down. It does not contain an official version from the Saudi government, nor a response from the coalition. It does not contain a death toll distinct from the injury count of September 8, and it does not specify whether among the seventy wounded there are facility workers or residents.

We also do not know whether merchant traffic through the strait has been halted, reduced or diverted: none of the sources available today reports data on transits. This is a significant absence, because it is the variable that would turn a regional conflict into a supply-chain problem for half the planet.

What can be written with certainty is the outline: an armed movement controls or contests positions on both sides of the passage and strikes from outside at the energy infrastructure of the region’s leading crude oil exporter. On the accounting side, the International Energy Agency forecasts for 2026 a world supply of 100.7 million barrels per day, 5.7 million less than the previous year, and a demand recovery of 2.6 million in 2027.