The Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) announced Friday that a large-scale operation launched earlier this month had expelled Saudi-backed formations from six districts across Taiz and Hudaydah governorates, culminating in the capture of the historic Red Sea port of al-Mokha and the advance to Dhubab and Mayyun Island, which sits at the narrowest point of the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

In a statement issued Thursday, YAF spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree said the operation, codenamed "And Allah Is Stronger in Might and More Severe in Punishment," was launched September 3 and covered 5,400 square kilometers, striking seven military divisions comprising 38 brigades and downing nine Saudi aircraft. 

The Saudi-backed government confirmed that the YAF had completed its takeover of the Bab al-Mandab area and Mayyun Island, while officials told Reuters that their own forces had withdrawn from the island. 

What changed hands this week was a stretch of coastline that sits astride one of the world's most important maritime choke points, a position that took a Saudi-Emirati coalition close to three years to build the first time around and that Sanaa has now retaken in a matter of days. 

Bab al-Mandab, Arabic for the Gate of Tears, connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, making it one of the world's most critical maritime choke points. Roughly 10 to 15 percent of global maritime trade and millions of barrels of crude oil and fuel daily transit through this narrow channel toward the Suez Canal. Whoever commands the coastlines of Bab al-Mandab holds decisive leverage over the trade routes linking Asia, the Arab world, and Europe.

Commanding those coastlines starts with commanding the port that sits closest to them. That is what makes al-Mokha, rather than any other point on Yemen's western coast, the city worth fighting over. 

Long before it was a military prize, al-Mokha was the reason the word "mocha" exists at all. From the 16th to the early 18th century, the port was the dominant hub of the world's coffee trade, exporting beans grown in Yemen's cooler highlands and carried down to the coast by caravan. 

Located on Yemen's southwestern coast, the city and port of al-Mokha sit roughly 75 kilometers north of the narrowest passage of Bab al-Mandab. Consolidating control over al-Mokha and the surrounding coastal districts gives Sanaa solid territorial depth along the western coast, extending its reach south from Hudaydah and removing what had been the principal base of forces aligned with the Saudi-backed government.

Territorial depth is only the first layer of what changed on September 10. The second is what that depth actually gives the YAF control of.

Control of al-Mokha and the coastal districts around it grants the YAF immediate coastal radar oversight, launch positions, and monitoring vantage points over the shipping lanes running through Bab al-Mandab.

It strengthens the YAF's ability to enforce its declared restrictions on Israeli-linked shipping and hostile vessels, and it tightens the pressure on the occupied port of Eilat by further constraining its already crippled southern maritime access.

What the YAF took control of on the ground was not empty coastline. Al-Mokha's port was rehabilitated by the UAE, and its airport runway, along with military camps including Khalid Camp Base and Jabal al-Nar Camp, the command headquarters for forces on the western coast, had served for years as the operational backbone of a Saudi-Emirati-backed military presence.

Oil tankers are the most visible traffic through Bab al-Mandab, but they are far from the only cargo that makes the strait matter. Beneath the surface, roughly 15 to 17 subsea fiber-optic cable systems carry a substantial share of the data traffic connecting Europe, East Africa, West Asia, and South Asia, making the strait a crucial node for global digital communications as much as for shipping.

Wheat, rice, sugar, and fertilizer move through this corridor alongside crude and LNG, a category of food security and agricultural trade that US officials have repeatedly flagged when assessing the risks of a Bab al-Mandab disruption.

As news broke of the YAF's control over the coast overlooking Bab al-Mandab, the US national average diesel price crossed $6 a gallon for the first time in history, reaching roughly $6.06 on September 11. The rise came as markets absorbed a widening set of pressures, from the US war on Iran and the subsequent disruption of Persian Gulf energy flows to tight inventories and refinery constraints, with Yemen's advance compounding the sense that Washington now faces mounting risk at two chokepoints instead of one.

With Bab al-Mandab now in the hands of Sanaa and the Strait of Hormuz under Tehran's control, the Axis of Resistance gains more leverage in facing Western imperialist agendas in the region.

The two chokepoints do not hand Iran and Yemen a single, unified command over the flow of West Asian energy, but they give aligned forces complementary pressure points on both maritime gateways serving the Arabian Peninsula, at a moment when Saudi Arabia has increasingly rerouted its own crude exports through the Red Sea to avoid the risks at Hormuz. 

The coastline Sanaa now holds took the Saudi-UAE coalition nearly three years to secure the first time, and it never captured the whole of it. Coalition-backed forces took Bab al-Mandab and Mayyun Island in October 2015, seven months after the Saudi-led aggression began.

Until shortly before al-Mokha fell, reports from the western coast had pointed to government advances, not retreat, after a week of fighting that saw Saudi-backed forces briefly recapture some of the ground they had lost. Their lines then collapsed within hours on September 10.

Ansarullah's explanation for that collapse centers on command structure. Political Bureau member Hizam al-Assad told the entry of the YAF into the western coastal areas was widely welcomed by local residents and that the operation was an internal one aimed at restoring Yemeni sovereignty over Yemeni territory.

Source: Almayadeen