Red Sea & Gulf
Maritime security, shipping corridors and Gulf-Horn relations shape a critical geopolitical theatre.
Maarifa Yanayohusiana
Saudi Arabia Built Two Coalitions in Six Weeks to Cover Exactly This Scenario. When Houthi Missiles Hit Its Oil Fields, Neither One Fired a Shot.
Yemen's Houthi movement fired dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia's Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan and Najran on 8 September and again on 9 September, wounding 73 civilians and igniting fires at Aramco energy facilities and a Saudi air base, the first strikes to reach so deep inside the kingdom since a 2022 truce collapsed in July. The attack arrived five weeks after Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, an Article 5-style mutual defense pact; Riyadh did not invoke it, and Ankara offered only a statement of condemnation. It arrived six weeks after Saudi Arabia stood up the 14-nation Multinational Maritime Defense Alliance that Somalia and Djibouti joined specifically to help secure the Red Sea; that alliance, built around ship escorts and tanker threats, had no mechanism to respond to a missile strike on Saudi soil, and Somalia's own condemnation recycled language about commercial vessels and freedom of navigation for an attack that struck an oil refinery and an airbase instead.
10 September 2026
Fourteen Countries, Somalia and Djibouti Among Them, Joined a Coalition to Guard Bab el-Mandeb From the Houthis. This Week the Houthis Tried to Just Take It.
Yemen's Houthi movement launched a major ground assault on 3 September, backed by rocket and drone fire, to seize elevated positions overlooking the government-held port of Mokha and territory bordering the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. An AFP tally of military and medical sources put the two-day death toll at 129 by 4 September, including 66 government soldiers and at least 62 Houthi fighters, before Yemen's government answered on 5 September with its own air force, not the Saudi-led coalition's, flying at least fifteen strikes against Houthi positions in Taiz and Hodeidah. Somalia and Djibouti are founding members of the fourteen-nation Multinational Maritime Defense Alliance Saudi Arabia assembled in July specifically to secure this stretch of water. Until this week, the threat it prepared for was missiles fired at tankers. This week, for the first time, Houthi fighters tried to seize the high ground the strait's security actually depends on.
7 September 2026