Yemen launches counteroffensive to retake Houthi-held territory — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council announced a Sunday counteroffensive to recapture all areas held by Iran-backed Houthis, with President Rashad al-Alimi saying forces will press on "until the country is liberated from the grip of the terrorist militia" and a military spokesman calling on Houthis to lay down arms.
- The Houthis seized the Bab el-Mandeb strait and roughly 150 km of Red Sea coast in a surprise offensive last month, gaining leverage over a key shipping route between the Mediterranean and Asia.
- The Houthis claimed to have struck Saudi Aramco sites in Riyadh and the Khurais area with ballistic missiles and drones, saying the attacks caused major fires and were retaliation for 50 Saudi-led strikes on Yemen in the previous 12 hours; Saudi Arabia did not immediately confirm.
- Saudi Arabia is leading aerial combat in the planned assault while Yemeni forces fight on the ground; the US is already providing intelligence to Riyadh, and regional and European nations are supplying mainly defensive military aid.
- Houthi forces advanced on strategic hilltops near Taiz over the past 48 hours, threatening the last road between Yemen's third-largest city and Aden — a breakthrough that would create an effective siege of a city home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.
- The World Food Programme reported that three in four families in parts of Yemen are going hungry, with tens of thousands displaced and supply lines disrupted to millions as the surge in fighting deepens an already-dire humanitarian crisis.
- A 2022 truce between the warring parties held until this year, when Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi shipping and oil infrastructure resumed as spillover from the wider US-Israel war against Iran launched in February.
Why it matters: With Houthis already controlling Sanaa, the Bab el-Mandeb strait, and pressing toward Taiz, the counteroffensive puts Saudi Arabia and its Yemeni allies on a collision course with an Iranian-backed militia that has held its ground against years of previous campaigns — and any collapse of government defenses around Taiz would tighten Houthi's grip on a Red Sea chokepoint that has grown more critical as the Strait of Hormuz faces disruption from the wider Iran war.
Ask SkimNews
