The last towns on the coast
Houthi fighters seized the last towns on Yemen's Red Sea coast early on Friday and crossed to Mayyun Island, also known as Perim, which sits at the heart of the Bab al-Mandeb strait; Yemeni government sources and witnesses described the advance, and fighters also reached the town of Dhubab on the strait's coast. A flag planted on an island settles very little. Whoever holds the entrance to the waterway is what a tanker charterer actually prices.[1]
Bab al-Mandeb links the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea and forms the approach to the Saudi oil terminals, so it has been the route that lets crude reach Europe while avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of global energy shipments were carried before the war between the United States and Iran began earlier this year. That is the whole point of the corridor: it exists because the other one is contested.[1]
Two gates, one owner's leverage
Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, told the Security Council on Thursday that the relative calm of the past four years has ended and the country has entered a new and more dangerous phase of war, days after Houthi forces took the Red Sea port of Mokha. The seizure of the island positions a day later is the same advance, read from the water rather than from the chamber.[1], [2]
Bab al-Mandeb and Hormuz are now both held against the same shipper, so the route that avoided Hormuz for Saudi crude bound for Europe runs through water an Iran-backed force controls. An embargo re-routes trade; a chokepoint does not, because there is nowhere to re-route to at the same cost. The alternative reading is that nothing changes in practice: the earlier Houthi campaign against shipping never closed the strait either, and owners who kept sailing paid in premiums rather than in cancelled voyages.[1]
Where the transit count comes in
Traffic in the Red Sea decreased significantly during the earlier Houthi campaign that targeted shipping there, and that same count is the test of the assurance a member of the Houthi politburo gave on Friday afternoon, when Hazem al-Assad said freedom of navigation and international trade in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb are safe and orderly. A promise from the party holding the gate is worth exactly as many transits as it produces.[1]
Meanwhile the price has already moved: oil was set to close above 100 dollars a barrel on Friday for the first time since mid-May. That figure carries the Hormuz war and the Red Sea advance together and cannot be split between them here, which is why the transit count matters more than the quote. The Houthi government has issued no official statement confirming control over Bab al-Mandeb, and the gap between the fighters on Mayyun Island and a declaration is itself information about how the group wants the corridor read.[1]