The Houthis have completed their takeover of the Bab el-Mandab area, seizing Mayyun Island in the middle of the strait after government forces withdrew. The advance follows the capture of Mokha and other positions along Yemen’s western coast, giving the Iran-aligned movement control of key territory on both the mainland approach and within the chokepoint itself.

That changes the strategic equation in the Red Sea. Control of Mayyun, which divides Bab el-Mandab into two shipping channels, places Houthi forces directly inside one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. Combined with their coastal positions around Mokha and Dhubab, the advance gives the Houthis a stronger platform for surveillance, missile and drone operations against shipping linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.

The advance represents the latest stage in a two-decade transformation of Ansar Allah from a localized Zaydi revivalist movement rooted in Saada into a significant component of Iran’s regional network. Its early campaigns against the Saleh government and later confrontation with the Saudi-led coalition were initially driven by domestic political and security dynamics. From the mid-2010s onward, however, expanding Iranian assistance, including weapons, missile technology, training, and military expertise, significantly strengthened the movement’s capabilities and facilitated its emergence as a major actor within the broader Axis of Resistance.

By 2023, the Houthis had demonstrated the ability to launch long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones against Israeli territory and commercial vessels in solidarity with Gaza operations. The 2026 campaign around Mokha and the western coast has taken place under direct Revolutionary Guard Corps guidance while Iran has maintained pressure on the Strait of Hormuz.

Tehran’s strategy increasingly treats the two chokepoints as complementary levers. Pressure at Hormuz constrains Gulf energy exports, while pressure at Bab el-Mandeb threatens the Saudi East-West pipeline’s Red Sea outlet at Yanbu and the traffic still using the Suez route. This creates a two-front form of economic coercion that forces adversaries and Western maritime powers to disperse naval assets while increasing insurance and freight costs, without requiring formal Iranian naval superiority.

Earlier conflicts show both the durability of maritime coercion and the limits of conventional responses against hybrid non-state actors. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egyptian naval units blockaded Bab el-Mandeb, sealing Israel’s southern trade gateway and forcing longer alternative routes. The blockade ended alongside the broader cease-fire and subsequent disengagement agreements.

During the 1980s Tanker War, Iranian and Iraqi attacks on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf prompted Kuwait to seek international protection, leading the United States to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers and launch Operation Earnest Will, the largest U.S. naval convoy operation since the Second World War. Convoys, mine countermeasures, and selective retaliatory strikes restored a degree of transit security, but they required sustained high-end naval presence and ultimately depended on a political settlement.

Houthi anti-shipping missile strikes in 2015 and 2016 foreshadowed the current pattern of asymmetric deniability. Conventional convoy doctrines and multinational task forces retain value against state navies, yet dispersed coastal and island bases, low-cost drones, ballistic systems, and transnational smuggling networks create a more difficult operating environment. Deterrence therefore increasingly depends on persistent intelligence dominance, targeted disruption of logistics, and alternative African-side anchors alongside maritime escorts.

Geography further raises the stakes. Bab el-Mandeb is a tri-border maritime space linking Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea. Houthi control of Mokha and movement toward Dhubab and the Hanish archipelago place sensors and launchers within effective range of the principal shipping channels, while control of these positions could create the capacity for direct interdiction and, potentially, coercive transit arrangements resembling the informal toll system that Iran has employed in the Strait of Hormuz.

Eritrea’s legal position adds another layer of complexity. Asmara remains outside the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and instead relies on customary international law and domestic legislation, whose baselines have already been tested in the Eritrea-Yemen arbitration. Its non-signatory status gives Eritrea greater unilateral latitude over territorial sea claims and freedom of movement around the Hanish Islands, while also leaving it outside formal cooperative frameworks such as the Saudi-led Council of Arab and African States Bordering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Asmara has historically combined limited external engagement with strategic ambiguity and a strong preference for littoral-state primacy in Red Sea security. As regional polarization deepens, Eritrea could accommodate Iranian-aligned networks or cooperate with Gulf and Western naval powers. Its record during the Yemen war shows why neither outcome should be assumed.

In late 2009, an Iranian intelligence-gathering vessel operated near Eritrea’s Dahlak Islands, while two arms shipments bound for Houthi-linked actors were intercepted between Eritrea and Yemen in October. The Yemeni government subsequently claimed that five Iranian trainers were aboard one of the vessels. Eritrea later granted the UAE access to Assab, which became a major logistics and launch hub for operations against the Houthis, demonstrating how rapidly Asmara can reposition as regional incentives change.

With renewed allegations of Iranian and Houthi activity around the Dahlak archipelago, Eritrea’s ports, islands, and maritime routes therefore warrant close intelligence and surveillance. Its strategic importance lies less in its ability to provide or deny access along one of the Red Sea’s most sensitive corridors.

The threat also extends across the Gulf of Aden. Operational collaboration between the Houthis and Somalia’s Al-Shabaab has evolved from episodic contact into structured exchanges involving weapons, drone technology, training, and maritime facilitation. Somali fighters have received instruction in Yemen on advanced systems, while Houthi personnel and components move across the Gulf of Aden through fishing vessels and front companies.

Al-Shabaab, in turn, expands piracy and interdiction capacity, multiplying pressure on commercial traffic. Turkey’s extensive military footprint in Somalia, centered on the TURKSOM training facility in Mogadishu and reinforced by expanded naval and air deployments, gives Ankara an increasingly consequential role. The August 2026 Mecca Joint Defence Agreement among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan formalizes mutual-defense language under which an armed attack on one constitutes an attack on all. This creates conditions in which Turkish facilities in Somalia could, in principle, support Saudi or collective operations against shared maritime threats, although Ankara’s own energy and space-related investments in Somalia will influence the practical scope of any access arrangement.

Israel’s engagement with Somaliland can likewise be viewed as an effort to build strategic depth on the African side of a vulnerable maritime chokepoint. Discussions between Israel and Somaliland began years before the current Houthi escalation and reflect an established Israeli interest in securing additional options around the Red Sea. Recognition, followed by discussions on defense cooperation and possible access to facilities such as Berbera International Airport, has since increased the strategic weight of that relationship.

Berbera’s position on the Gulf of Aden, combined with its deep-water port and infrastructure developed with Emirati investment, could support maritime surveillance, intelligence collection, and logistical access. The rationale has grown stronger as the Houthis have demonstrated their ability to project force across the Red Sea and directly threaten Israel’s southern maritime link. Houthi attacks have already targeted Eilat and sharply reduced activity at Israel’s only Red Sea port, demonstrating the economic and strategic cost of leaving the southern approach exposed.

Somaliland therefore fits into a broader Israeli effort to build an additional layer of strategic depth opposite Yemen, giving Jerusalem greater visibility and more response options as Houthi capabilities move closer to effective control of the Bab el-Mandeb. The significance of the advance on 10 September is that it has made a long-standing Israeli calculation considerably more consequential.

Leadership positions reflect these wider pressures. President Trump has emphasized freedom of navigation while declining direct Saudi requests for immediate U.S. strikes against the Houthis, favoring intelligence sharing and maintaining a primary focus on the Iranian theater and Hormuz. The administration’s posture places regional partners at the forefront of the response.

Saudi Arabia faces immediate vulnerabilities along its southern frontier and around the Yanbu export corridor, which has become the principal alternative to Hormuz. Riyadh has carried out retaliatory airstrikes while preserving diplomatic channels with Tehran and seeking wider coalition support, even as the risk of a complete collapse of the 2022 truce remains elevated. For Iran, each additional increment of Houthi coastal control disperses Israeli naval and air assets and raises the cost of sustaining southern trade routes.

The economic effects are already visible. Rerouting through the Cape of Good Hope increases voyage time and fuel consumption, while war-risk insurance premiums, container rates, and energy-price volatility have risen. Supply-chain bottlenecks add to inflationary pressures. Egypt faces direct erosion of Suez Canal transit revenues, a critical source of foreign exchange. Saudi Arabia absorbs higher security costs and continuing risks to its Red Sea energy corridor. Horn of Africa states face import inflation, food-security shocks, and volatility in port revenues. European economies confront higher energy and manufacturing input costs, while Israel faces stagnation at Eilat and longer supply lines. Egypt and Saudi Arabia remain the most immediately exposed, followed by the Horn states and then the European Union and Israel, reflecting differences in trade dependence and the availability of alternative routes.

Looking into it all, the Houthi takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb area signals a fundamental restructuring of Red Sea security, transforming the chokepoint from a contested transit corridor into a frontline in the wider Iran-Israel confrontation. By extending its reach from Yemen’s western coast into the strait itself, Tehran has gained greater leverage over one of the world’s most critical maritime routes while drawing the Horn of Africa deeper into the strategic fallout of the Middle East conflict.

That shift also changes the challenge facing those seeking to secure the waterway. Conventional freedom-of-navigation patrols and intermittent retaliatory strikes will struggle to contain a threat built around dispersed coastal positions, low-cost drones, missiles, and flexible logistics networks. The more likely outcome is a prolonged period of elevated maritime risk, higher freight and insurance costs, and increasingly fragmented security arrangements. The strategic priority therefore needs to move toward persistent intelligence, disruption of coastal and maritime supply networks, and stronger coordination across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Without a cross-regional security framework capable of addressing threats on both sides of the waterway, localized changes around the chokepoints will continue to produce wider shocks to shipping, energy markets, and global supply chains.

Bezawit Eshetu, Researcher, Horn Review