Mokha Changed Hands

> When the Strait of Hormuz closed, Saudi Arabia moved its oil onto the Red Sea. On Thursday the Red Sea coast changed hands. The part of this that nobody is saying out loud is that the alternative route had already lost half its oil volume before the fighting reached it, so what was taken this week is a share of a passage that never recovered from the last war fought over it.

Mokha fell on Thursday morning. Houthi fighters took the port from forces of Yemen's internationally recognised government, who had been using it as their only significant harbour on the Red Sea and as the headquarters of their coastal command. Other fighters came ashore on the Hanish Islands the same morning. By late morning the Houthis announced that they were stopping.

The port they captured is a wreck, and they are the ones who wrecked it. In August more than twenty-five rockets landed in the harbour while commercial ships were unloading. Sixteen people were killed. Six ships went down at their berths and the port has been closed ever since.

Distance is what changed. Mokha sits roughly seventy kilometres from the shipping lanes through Bab el-Mandeb, which is close enough to bring artillery into a problem that until now required missiles and drones. It also brings the coastline into view, which matters more. You cannot run a passage regime over ships you cannot see.

The next piece of ground is Perim Island, which lies inside the strait rather than beside it. Yemeni government forces have been redeploying south to keep them off it. A commander in those forces was asked what happens if they fail. They would mine the strait, he said, the way Iran mined Hormuz.

Tehran's hand is reported from three directions at once. Yemeni, Iranian and regional sources all say Iran supplied the weapons and the guidance. American officials put hundreds of Revolutionary Guard officers inside Yemen. Yemeni sources name the Quds Force commander they say runs the coastal campaign, a man who ran the same coast in the last Red Sea war.

That reading deserves one caution, because the people who know Yemen best keep declining to sign it. The Houthis needed this war for reasons of their own, among them a domestic crisis and a wish to drag Riyadh back to a negotiating table. Helping an old friend is the part that comes free.

Now the number that reframes the week. Three years ago about a tenth of the world's seaborne oil trade moved through Bab el-Mandeb. Today that volume is half what it was, and it has been half since the last campaign against Red Sea shipping, and nobody ever put it back. Saudi Arabia's answer to a closed Hormuz was to route its exports onto a strait that had already been cut in two.

Seven ships crossed Hormuz on Tuesday, against something near a hundred and twenty-five a day before the war. Brent is above a hundred dollars. The kingdom's first exit is empty, and the second one is now being fought over.

Riyadh is answering. Saudi and Yemeni government aircraft hit Houthi columns coming down from the mountains west of Taiz on the day the port fell, and government forces have declared a kill zone across the coastal plain around it. They have left the harbour itself alone, which is the clearest statement of intent on offer. An army does not flatten a port it expects to be using. Behind that sits the maritime coalition the Saudis began assembling in late July, fourteen states by their own count, built for this stretch of water.

What nobody can tell you is what happens next. Not one ship has been counted through Bab el-Mandeb since Mokha fell. No toll has been charged there, and the Houthis say publicly that passage is free for vessels they authorise, which is a sentence doing a great deal of quiet work. Whether the traffic keeps moving is a question for measurement, and the count that settles it does not exist yet.