Trump rules out intervention against the Houthis, Riyadh suspends response

This morning this newspaper led with the Houthi advance along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and the halted Saudi energy facilities. Over the course of the day two new developments emerged, both concerning the response — or its absence.

The first: Donald Trump, speaking from Ireland, said on September 12 that the United States will not intervene against the Yemeni rebels. This is reported by El País, which links the statement to the closure of the Saudi East-West pipeline, halted since Friday evening after the attack that hit it.

The second: Riyadh announced on September 12 that it will not respond for now. The position is reported by the Saudi Press Agency (Saudi state agency) and also appears in El País’s account: the kingdom states it wants to leave the Iraqi government the opportunity to prevent new attacks. Saudi attribution indeed points to Iraqi territory as the origin of the drones, with targets hit in the regions of Riyadh and Medina. The attack caused injuries and damage; in the sources consulted no number of injured appears, and until it does this newspaper will not report one. The infrastructure involved is the pipeline that crosses the country from east to west, 1,200 kilometers long according to El País: it serves to carry crude oil from the Gulf toward the Red Sea, that is, to avoid passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Halting it means handing traffic back to the route it was meant to bypass.

On the ground, meanwhile, the geography is shifting

The military picture has changed within hours. A Yemeni government official told AFP that boats carrying armed Houthi men arrived on Mayyun island — also known as Perim — after government forces had withdrawn from it; the dispatch is picked up by Khlaasa Net. Reuters, citing Yemeni government sources, reports that the fighters reached the coastal town of Dhubab, overlooking the strait: the account appears on Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and on Asharq Al-Awsat, which draws on Yemeni government sources and the AP agency. The original quote from the Yemeni official exceeds the word limit this newspaper has set for itself: we summarize it without quotation marks.

Mayyun sits in the middle of the passage between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The advance follows the capture of the port city of Mokha and the extension of control over islands in the southern Red Sea, including Zuqar and the Hanish archipelago. Roughly 7% of world oil production passes through the strait.

No independent international confirmation of full control over Mayyun or of operational control over Bab el-Mandeb has so far emerged.

This is the point that separates a military position from the capacity to close a route. Arriving on an island is not the same as governing the traffic passing beside it, and no third-party source has so far certified the latter.

The two chokepoints together

On the opposite side of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran has announced that Oman will host a regional meeting devoted to shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz: the announcement appears in the September 12 world briefing from Anadolu Agency and is picked up, alongside the Yemeni picture, by the Aks Alser roundup. Date, venue and participants do not appear in the available material.

Two decisive elements remain beyond our reach: when and whether the East-West pipeline will resume operation, and what the Iraqi government’s response to the Saudi request will be. What is established as of 4:30 p.m. is that two of the three routes for Middle Eastern crude oil — the overland pipeline and the Bab el-Mandeb passage — are today, for different reasons, less available than a week ago.