April 6, 2026:
Iran continued to smuggle weapons to the Houthi rebels in Yemen until these shipments were disrupted by the current Israeli American attacks on Iran. The Houthis still have enough missiles, rockets and small boats carrying explosives to send enough to the Red Sea to damage or sink commercial shipping. The Houthis have threatened to, but not resumed, their attacks. That could change at any moment.
In 2024 the Iran-backed Shia Houthi militia began hijacking passing merchant ships, as the Al Shabab militants in nearby Somalia have been doing for decades. CMF 151, the international maritime patrol off Somalia was created in 2009. For the last seven years CMF 151 hasn’t had much to do, but now the pirates are back, in Yemen and Somalia. The Houthis also fire some missiles at Israel, causing damage and casualties. The Israelis responded with air and naval attacks on the main Yemeni port of Hodeidah and the capital city Saana. The United States also launched a series of airstrikes across Yemen.
The Houthis are also accused of cutting underwater cables in the Red Sea, disrupting internet access in the Middle East and parts of Asia. Throughout all this refugees from Africa were crossing from Somalia or Ethiopia, though some of these boats don’t make it and hundreds of refugees have died this way in 2025,
At the end of the year the tribal militias of the Southern Transitional Council claims took control of eight provinces in southern Yemen, including Aden, the largest port in Yemen. This new entity will become another independent entity in Yemen.
The Houthi militia is losing but refuse to make peace out of fear of the consequences. They used their Iran-supplied rockets and missiles to fire at merchant ships heading up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal, and occasionally at Israel and Saudi Arabia. One of those missiles landed in Israel. Because of all this Houthi mischief both Israel and the United States launched air strikes on Houthi operations as well as economic targets in Yemen. Iran is no longer able to resupply the Houthis with missiles and UAVs because Israeli air strikes destroyed key elements of the Iranian missile production industry. It’s been a bad year for the Houthi militia, and several countries plan to make 2026 an even worse year.
A century ago, before oil income dominated Arabian politics, Yemen was the land of promise as it is the only portion of the Arabian Peninsula that receives enough rain for crops. Since World War II Iran has become wealthy and powerful because of oil wealth but made so much trouble that since 2015 economic sanctions have crippled the economy and military adventurism has brought devastating armed reprisals.
Yemen proved to be an embarrassment for Iran and the Saudi/UAE-backed Yemen government. The other Arabs are not willing to suffer the heavy casualties a quick victory would require over militant Yemen. The war dragged on into 2025 but is now faltering because Iran is no longer sending missiles to Yemen. Iranian withdrawal from Houthi support occurred this year because Iran was overwhelmed by sanctions and Israeli reprisals.
Yemen unrest evolved into a full-scale civil war in 2015. That was when Shia rebels (the Houthis) sought to take control of the entire country. Neighboring Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, quickly formed a military coalition to halt the Yemeni rebel advance. The Arab coalition succeeded and by 2016 pro-government forces were closing in on the rebel-held capital. The coalition did not go after the capital itself because of the expected heavy casualties and property damage in the city. The coalition concentrated on rebuilding the Yemeni armed forces, recruiting allies from the Sunni tribes in the south and eliminating al Qaeda and ISIL groups that had grown stronger as the Shia rebels gained more power. As the fighting intensified in early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing.
Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to seal the deal. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since. This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This whole nation idea is still looked on with some suspicion by many in the region. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate or their modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.
For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Islamic militants in the north. They have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam religious leader. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962. After 2007 Yemen became the new headquarters of AQAP/Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists. Next was ISIL and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors. By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerated or even supported AQAP and ISIL. The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf state, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Shia rebels live in northern Yemen and control the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last decade the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles that could hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast.
The rebels also fired more missiles at targets passing the Yemen Red Sea coast controlled by the rebels. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source for Egypt, bringing in nearly $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make that success possible. At the end of 2023 Iran ordered the Yemen rebels to open fire on shipping in the Red Sea, which moves along the Yemen coast on its way to or from Saudi ports or the Suez Canal.
Ships unable to use the canal must take the longer route around the southern tip of Africa. This takes more time and increases costs for the shipping company and their customers. In 2024 Americans and Israeli airstrikes devastated ports on the west coast of Yemen and destroyed most of the missiles smuggled in from Iran. Meanwhile Iran was running out of missiles, and a tighter naval blockade reduced the number of weapons reaching the Shia Houthi militia in Yemen.