The Red Sea is Exposed
The Sana’a airport strike trapped Riyadh, secured Iran an un-inspected corridor, and is pretext for Houthis and Tehran to escalate in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb.
Monday’s strike on Sana’a airport was aimed at an aircraft. A Mahan Air jet, sanctioned by the United States for ferrying weapons and personnel for the Quds Force, carrying the Houthi delegation home from Khamenei’s funeral. The plane diverted to Hodeidah, in Houthi hands, and we got to watch them chanting death to America in the cabin, celebrating the reroute and the safe landing.
What I could not understand is why that delegation was on that plane to begin with, as Saudi warplanes had tried to turn the same aircraft back when it first traveled to Iran. There is no way the passengers did not know a second attempt was coming and that their lives were on the line. However, they boarded anyway, and they were still in the air when the strip beneath them was blown out.
There are reports that the Yemeni government, which has been fighting the militia and claimed responsibility for the runway attack, facilitated another way home. And this is often the usual most preferred route for negotiations which could have easily been routed through Jordan and submitted to inspection. However, it is plausible that Tehran insisted on this flight because there was cargo aboard, such as missile components, that Iran wanted moved without anyone looking at them. But even if we accept that Iran was intent on smuggling through air, it is still an enormous risk for the Houthis to take.
The calculation that KSA might not strike the plane is plausible, given that the Saudis have learned to contain their conventional power after years of war with the Houthis. But it also points to an escalation that Iran and the Houthis seem able to afford. Which is why the Red Sea is more exposed today than it was at the start of the war. Three things follow, and I want to walk through them in order, because each is a step in the same progression.
One. There was no move Riyadh could make that Tehran had not already priced.
Look at who was actually on that plane. Nasr al-Din Amer, who chairs the Houthi media board at SABA, and other delegation members senior enough to be worth photographing.
The most senior man aboard was the movement’s mufti, Shams al-Din Sharaf al-Din, who has spent the past period stepping up to the pulpit on the leadership’s behalf. The Yemeni journalist Faris al-Himyari reported today that Sharaf al-Din wanted to stay behind in Tehran and travel on to India for medical treatment, and that according to his source he was refused, since the leadership barred him from remaining and forced him back aboard the Iranian aircraft that ultimately landed in Houthi-controlled Hodeidah.
If it were me, I would not have boarded either. He did not get the choice.
The flight had two possible endings and Tehran was covered by both. Land it, and the corridor is established. Hit it, and the corridor is established anyway, along with the reason to escalate over having been denied it.
Look at what Riyadh was left with. Striking the aircraft was never an option for the Saudis, not only because of a humanitarian concern but also because of what it would have done to their standing. A downed civilian plane “carrying patients“ and a returning delegation is a story the Kingdom cannot survive, and it invites retaliation. So they hit the runway instead, which was the cheaper option, and the cheaper option handed Iran a corridor that stays open, an aircraft that landed safely, and a grievance with witnesses. Riyadh chose the least costly move available, and it was still a win for Tehran.
The escalation began when the Saudi-backed Yemeni government announced the strike on the airport on Monday, and the Houthis answered by hitting Abha and declaring a ban on Saudi airspace, warning airlines not to cross, and all of it fits a pattern in which the confrontation itself is the objective, particularly given that this delegation was returning from Khamenei’s funeral in Tehran. Tehran had already committed itself in public. On July 4, Araghchi announced that Iran was prepared to mobilize all of its diplomatic capabilities to lift the blockade on Yemen and fully implement the peace roadmap. He said that ten days before the runway was destroyed, and the flight was the first practical test of it. Once Riyadh signaled it would deny the route, every subsequent flight became useful to Iran whether it landed or not. And for the first time in a long while the escalation now points at the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb, where Iran has wanted leverage for years and has never been able to justify taking it. It is the Houthi story of having been wronged, of aggression absorbed and answered, that lets the two of them move in tandem.
Two. Iran wants for the Houthis what it already won for Hezbollah.
This might look like a Saudi-Houthi escalation, but a sanctioned aircraft went into the sky, and it went because Iran was behind it.
The heart of this remains an Iran-United States confrontation in which Tehran is running the fight through a proxy so that Washington and Riyadh spend themselves against the proxy rather than against the state. The Houthis, in this instance, are implementing Iran’s strategy and advocating for Iran’s interests rather than Yemen’s, and by parroting the threats on Bab al-Mandeb and on the Kingdom they become the megaphone through which Iran projects a deterrent it would otherwise have to project itself, and pay for itself. The sovereignty claim works the same way, since a sovereign Sana’a is an uninspected Sana’a, and an uninspected Sana’a is a corridor.
So in this instance, escalation back and forth, and Saudi attacks on Yemen in particular, would be perfectly useful to Iran, which can then rope the Houthis into its memorandum of understanding with the United States in the same way it tried to rope in Hezbollah, negotiating on behalf of its proxy and extracting further concessions while paying nothing for the fighting that produces the leverage. It is a bar Iran has cleared before, in Lebanon, on the same terms and against the same objections, which is why Riyadh should recognize what it is being walked into, having already watched it done to Beirut.
The Houthis claim that this was a violation of sovereignty, which is a strange thing to claim, because it is not something that they have. But it goes to something the movement cares about more than almost anything else. They despise being called a militia, which is why they insist on Ansar Allah, the supporters of God, and why they have confiscated the ministries and run them as a government. What they want is recognition, and they are pursuing it through Iran, and increasingly through Russia and China, which I wrote about for AGSI. Deciding who lands at Sana’a is that whole project compressed into a single airport.
But consider what is actually being asked for here. An armed group is demanding the right to open its own airspace to a sanctioned foreign carrier, and to refuse inspection while doing it. There is no version of the international system that survives granting that, and no state in the region would grant it to anyone else. If Iran wanted the corridor and not the crisis, it would have taken Jordan. The route was open. The inspection was the only cost, and the inspection was the entire point of refusing. Whatever is moving through an uninspected Sana’a is what the Houthis will eventually aim at the Red Sea, which is the only reason any of this is worth the crisis.
Three. Iran is frustrated, and Bab al-Mandeb is where it could answer.
Tehran is growing frustrated with Trump’s claims about Hormuz, that the strait is open and functioning under American guarantee, when the Iranians insist it is closed and under their control. The argument is running in public, and it is difficult to bear for a state that has just absorbed more than eighty American strikes across its southern provinces for the privilege of holding a waterway it cannot actually use. That frustration has to go somewhere, however, and it will not go to Hormuz, where Iran pays for everything it does, which leaves the Red Sea, where it pays for nothing.
If Iran wanted to strike Bab al-Mandeb directly, it appears that it can. In March it fired ballistic missiles at a joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia, roughly 3,800 kilometers away, and let the world watch it happen.
Which brings me to the flaw at the center of the Islamabad MOU, which I have written about last month, since the text does not mention ballistic missiles at all. Asked about that on June 18, JD Vance said you cannot tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, that it has no right to defend itself, and that what the deal would prevent is Iran building the kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world. But Diego Garcia is not the world. It is 3,800 kilometers, and it is regional by the standard Vance himself set, and so is Bab al-Mandeb at 2,300. The category he carved out as a legitimate defense is the one that puts a global shipping lane within Iran's reach, and Iran had demonstrated that reach three months before he said it.
Firing directly into Bab al-Mandeb, however, would cost Tehran the ambiguity it has been living on, since it would alert Washington to the reach and hand the administration a reason to walk back the memorandum. Which is why the proxy remains useful. The Houthis are how Iran gets the pressure without the attribution.
I have said consistently that the Houthis would not close Bab al-Mandeb, attacks yes and closure no, and I am not revising that now, though I want to be honest about what has changed and what has not. My assessment rested partly on interdiction, on the fact that the components were being caught before they arrived, and the flights into Sana’a are an attempt to change exactly that, so it is possible that enough has landed to make the movement more confident than it was. I still doubt they can sustain a closure, since a handful of flights does not rebuild an arsenal. But sustaining it may not be what is required of them.
What the Houthis need alongside the weapons is a justification, and they have spent the past two months building one. The blockade did not enter their vocabulary until recently, and it has now become the frame for everything, the reason the airport matters, the reason the airspace matters, the reason a response is owed. A movement under siege has a case, and the case is what lets Iran act on its behalf. And Iran does not need to close anything to collect, since it only needs the underwriters to believe that it might, and the world pays that premium long before anything is launched.
Watch this closely, because the outcome will not be settled in Yemen. The Islamabad memorandum may not survive the month. Iran says it is finished, Washington is blockading, and nobody defends it. But something will replace it, because something always does, and whatever comes next will have to price the Red Sea, since that is what Tehran will carry to the table. Everything happening at Bab al-Mandeb between now and then is bargaining, nothing more, a way of establishing what Iran will have to be paid to stop doing something it never intended to do permanently. There is still no consistent strategy anywhere for dealing with any of it. The Houthis will absorb the strikes, and Iran will collect the concessions.
Video of the strike as shown in Houthi media.