Dire Straits: Houthi aggression in the Bab al-Mandab Strait
Since November 2023, Yemen’s Ansar Allah militia – known as the Houthis, after its founding family – has been attacking merchant shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The trigger for this was solidarity with the population of Gaza though, as we shall discuss, the underlying drivers are more complex; in any case, the attacks and their motivations have expanded as...