SEA TRANSPORTATION: The Ongoing Battle For The Red Sea
19th July 2024
It’s been a decade since the last outbreak of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the adjacent Red Sea waters was suppressed. Now there is a new campaign by Iran-backed Somali Shia rebels, led by a local militia leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi. Houthi’s group decided to declare war in Israel after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israelis and other foreigners visiting a music festival near the Gaza Israeli border. Hamas killed over a thousand people, most of them civilians. The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soon arrived and Hamas has been on the run ever since. For over a decade the Houthi group has been supplied with weapons by Iran. This included missiles to attack targets in Saudi Arabia. The Yemen military was never able to suppress the Houthi violence but that changed when the Houthis began attacking commercial shipping.
The current round of Houthis violence against commercial shipping heading for the Suez Canal or making deliveries to Red Sea countries has led to over a half a dozen NATO nations sending warships to protect cargo ships in the Red Sea by attacking the Houthis rebels and their Iranian missiles in Yemen. American warships and naval aviation have already used hundreds of missiles against Houthi targets in Yemen. This has diminished the Houthi attacks but not entirely eliminated them. That would take a ground war in Yene. For over a decade the Houthis have been leading a rebellion against the Yemen government. For a while Arab nations sent troops to assist in suppressing the Houthis and now the Americans are sending an assault ship with a battalion of marines on board.