The runway on Mayyun is about 1,800 metres long. It crosses the volcanic island near the point where the Red Sea narrows into Bab al-Mandab, dividing the strait into an eastern channel beside Yemen and a wider western channel toward Djibouti. Satellite images first showed construction on the airstrip in 2021, when the United Arab Emirates was building a chain of military positions around the ports and islands of southern Yemen. The official explanation was maritime security. The runway would support the forces keeping a strategic waterway open, the Saudi-led coalition said its presence on Mayyun served the war against the Houthis, and Abu Dhabi had spent years building and arming Yemeni formations along the coast, and yet on September 11, 2026, Houthi fighters took the island those arrangements were meant to protect.
The seizure came one day after the fall of Mokha. Reuters reported on September 10 that four military sources from Yemen’s internationally recognised government had confirmed the loss of the historic port city. Government forces withdrew south toward Dhubab, directly opposite Mayyun. By the next morning, a senior government military official and a Houthi official had separately confirmed Mayyun’s capture to the Associated Press. The Houthis had moved in days from positions in southern Hudaydah through Hays and Al-Khawkhah, into Mokha, down the coast, and onto the island sitting inside the passage through which Saudi Arabia now moves much of the oil it cannot safely send through Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia built its East-West pipeline to reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, expanded the route from its eastern oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, and relied on it when Iran’s war with the United States constricted Gulf shipping in 2026. The US Energy Information Administration calculated that oil flows through Bab al-Mandab rose from 5.4 million barrels a day in the final quarter of 2025 to 8.1 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2026. Riyadh’s escape from one contested strait crossed another, and the armed movement it had spent eleven years trying to defeat was waiting on the coast.
The madness at Bab al-Mandab took eleven years to assemble: Saudi air power, Emirati bases, Iranian weapons, American naval operations, fractured Yemeni armies, and peace negotiations that reduced the firing without resolving who governed the country. Every foreign patron built the part of Yemen it needed. Saudi Arabia sponsored a recognised government that often governed from Riyadh. The UAE trained formations that fought the Houthis, rival government units, and one another. Iran helped transform a movement from the northern highlands into a missile and drone force capable of imposing costs at sea. The United States treated the water as an international security problem while treating the land producing that insecurity as someone else’s war, and now the pieces meet on a runway in the strait.
The Escape Route Ends at Yemen
Most Saudi oil production lies in the east, close to the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, while the kingdom’s alternative export terminal at Yanbu sits on the Red Sea. The East-West pipeline, known as Petroline, moves crude across the peninsula so tankers can leave Yanbu, sail south, pass Bab al-Mandab, and enter the Gulf of Aden without approaching Hormuz. The national bypass contains hundreds of kilometres of pipe, pumping stations, storage tanks, and coastal loading facilities, but all of it still depends on ships passing a channel twenty-eight kilometres wide between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
In ordinary conditions, that dependence is manageable. In 2024 and the first half of 2025, Houthi attacks had already pushed much commercial traffic around the Cape of Good Hope. EIA figures show that oil moving through Bab al-Mandab fell from 9.3 million barrels a day in 2023 to 4.1 million in 2024 and 4.2 million in the first half of 2025. The route carried far less traffic, insurance costs rose, and shipping companies added days and fuel to Asia-Europe voyages, but the global system absorbed the detour because Hormuz remained available.
The 2026 Iran war removed that margin. EIA data show oil flows through Hormuz falling from 21.6 million barrels a day in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 4.9 million in the second quarter of 2026. Saudi Arabia moved more crude through Petroline and Yanbu, and Bab al-Mandab flows climbed to 8.1 million barrels a day. One quarter of the world’s petroleum does not pass the Yemeni coast, as some accounts claimed. The documented danger is that the volume through Bab al-Mandab nearly doubled as the Gulf route contracted, concentrating Saudi dependence on the water beside Houthi territory at the exact moment Tehran sought pressure beyond Hormuz.
On July 20, the Houthis declared what they called a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia. Their military spokesman said ships dealing with Saudi ports could be targeted in response to the kingdom’s long blockade of Houthi-held Yemen. On July 22, the group claimed attacks on two tankers, although ACLED found that one reported strike lacked confirmation outside Houthi sources. On July 25, it struck the Jazan refinery, and on August 24 it attacked a tanker off Yanbu, according to the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. Saudi tankers began using what ACLED described as “dark” transits, switching off tracking signals in the Red Sea while other cargoes moved north through Egypt.
The Houthis do not need the capacity to stop every ship. A missile striking one tanker, an explosive boat reaching another, or a mine report near an approach channel can make an insurer recalculate the voyage and a shipping company order its captain south toward the Cape. Two China-bound ships carrying Saudi crude passed through Bab al-Mandab without incident on July 23, according to ACLED, which suggests selective enforcement rather than a physical closure. Selective passage gives an armed authority on the coast the power to identify a flag, owner, destination, or political relationship and decide which cargo receives risk and which cargo receives passage.
On August 1, the Houthi-run Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center denied reports that it would charge ships for transit. Its “Safe Transit Service,” the statement said, was voluntary and free, and companies should refuse payment demands from anyone claiming to act on its behalf. The same notice asked shipowners to submit vessel information through Houthi-approved channels and warned them against sharing it with unauthorised parties. There was no published toll, and claims of a fee arranged with Tehran remain unproven, but the notice instructed shipping companies to recognise an armed Yemeni authority as the institution that could certify safe passage through international water.
By September, the Houthis had moved from threatening the route to seizing its ground. Missiles and drones had already given them distance. Mokha, Dhubab, and Mayyun gave them proximity. Control of the island does not deliver uncontested command of Bab al-Mandab because foreign warships remain in the region, Djibouti and Eritrea face the channel from Africa, and holding land is different from continuously policing water. It gives the Houthis better observation, shorter attack lines, possible positions for mines and anti-ship weapons, and a claim to the physical gate Saudi Arabia must use. Saudi Arabia’s paper escape from Hormuz still ran through Yemen.
Eleven Years to Lose Mokha
The Houthi movement’s military organisation grew through six wars against the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh between 2004 and 2010 in Saada, where Zaydi communities had faced the expansion of Saudi-backed Salafi influence, political exclusion, and state violence. The movement participated in the 2011 uprising against Saleh, entered the National Dialogue Conference, and then expanded by force when Yemen’s transition failed. Its path to Sanaa ran through local grievances, temporary alliances, surrendered army units, and a central government whose authority had collapsed before the capital did.
The transition installed Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi through a one-candidate election in 2012. It was supposed to last two years. Hadi inherited divided security forces, Saleh’s networks inside the state, a southern secessionist movement, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, falling public revenue, and a political process whose federal proposal threatened to leave the Houthis landlocked in a northern region with limited resources. When Hadi’s government removed fuel subsidies in 2014, public anger gave the Houthis an issue larger than their northern base. They advanced through Amran and entered Sanaa on September 21, assisted by military and tribal networks loyal to the president they had fought for six years.
Saleh had commanded the state that bombed the Houthis, the Houthis had built their identity through resistance to him, and both saw the post-2011 transition as a threat to their power. Saleh wanted revenge against the rivals who had removed him and the Houthis wanted the military access his officers could provide. The units that yielded in Sanaa did not dissolve. Much of their personnel, armour, missiles, institutional knowledge, and command infrastructure entered the new order.
The Houthis placed supervisors inside ministries, detained Hadi, issued a constitutional declaration in February 2015, and moved south. Hadi escaped to Aden and then Saudi Arabia. On March 26, Riyadh launched Operation Decisive Storm with the declared purpose of restoring his government and reversing the Houthi advance. Saudi Arabia brought aircraft and money, the UAE brought ground forces and local formations, the United States supplied weapons, intelligence support, maintenance, and diplomatic protection, and yet the intervention that was presented as a quick restoration became the system through which Yemen was divided.
The coalition recovered Aden and much of southern Yemen in 2015 while Sanaa remained under Houthi control. Airstrikes hit military targets, homes, markets, funerals, hospitals, roads, and economic infrastructure across the following years, while restrictions on ports and airports tightened the movement of food, fuel, medicine, and people. The Houthis survived, absorbed more of the old state, expanded their missile capability, and killed Saleh when their alliance collapsed in December 2017. Riyadh had entered the war to remove them from power. By the end of the decade, they controlled the capital, the main Red Sea port at Hudaydah, and most of the country’s population.
Mokha belonged to the other Yemen. Forces commanded by Tareq Saleh, a nephew of the former president, became a principal part of the anti-Houthi West Coast structure. The family network that helped the Houthis enter Sanaa later received Emirati backing to fight them from a coastal base. Other formations included the Giants Brigades, local resistance units, government soldiers, southern forces, and armed groups connected to different political patrons. They shared an enemy but not a state.
The 2018 Stockholm Agreement stopped a coalition offensive on Hudaydah. Its port handled imports essential to millions of Yemenis, and a full battle risked mass civilian consequences. The agreement created a ceasefire around Hudaydah and proposed redeployment from the city and its ports, but it did not settle control of the wider coast or rebuild a unified national authority. The Houthis kept Hudaydah and its adjacent maritime infrastructure. Anti-Houthi forces held Mokha and the coast running south toward Bab al-Mandab. The line froze, and every side used the pause to preserve what it had.
The UN-brokered nationwide truce began in April 2022 and expired that October. Large-scale ground combat remained lower after the formal agreement ended, and Saudi-Houthi talks through Oman continued. Riyadh wanted an exit from a war that had failed to achieve its stated objective. The Houthis wanted salary payments, eased restrictions on ports and Sanaa airport, a share of oil revenue, and recognition of the authority they already exercised. The internationally recognised government watched negotiations about Yemen proceed between Saudi officials and the force that had expelled it from the capital.
In April 2022, Hadi transferred his powers to an eight-member Presidential Leadership Council under Saudi pressure. The new body gathered figures from competing anti-Houthi camps, but a shared council did not produce a shared chain of command. The UAE retained influence through southern and coastal forces. Saudi Arabia financed the recognised government and managed its disputes. The Southern Transitional Council pursued an independent south while formally sitting inside a council committed to Yemeni unity. The institutional map became so accommodating that rival projects could occupy the same cabinet while their soldiers guarded different checkpoints.
The arrangement changed again in early 2026. Saudi-backed forces reversed Southern Transitional Council gains, took Aden, and announced the council’s dissolution. The STC retained supporters and armed capacity, so the declaration did not erase southern separatism. Riyadh became the main external actor holding together the government camp after the UAE ended its direct involvement, according to the Sana’a Center. Saudi Arabia had gained greater command over its allies when they faced the most serious Houthi offensive since the truce, and then Mokha fell.
The Mountain Movement Reaches the Sea
The Houthis learned maritime war before the Gaza conflict. After taking Hudaydah and old Yemeni military stockpiles, they used coastal fire against ships during 2015 and 2016, deployed water-borne explosive devices from 2017, and expanded those operations in 2020 and 2021. The UN Panel of Experts documented increasingly capable drones and land-attack cruise missiles. Iranian weapons, components, training, and technical knowledge changed the range and precision available to the movement, but former Yemeni military personnel and captured state arsenals also mattered. The force operating at sea was produced by Iranian assistance and by the ruins of Yemen’s own armed forces.
The Gaza war gave that capability a larger political field. From late 2023, the Houthis attacked commercial vessels they described first as Israeli-linked and later as connected to ports or states involved in the assault on Gaza. Their target definitions changed, their identification was sometimes false, and crews with no authority over the war faced missiles, capture, injury, and death. The operations also expressed a position with broad support across Yemen and the Arab world: ships could not carry commerce through nearby water as if the destruction of Gaza belonged to another political universe.
Houthi rule inside Yemen remains coercive. The authorities in Sanaa have detained civil society workers and UN personnel, restricted political space, imposed their religious and political programme through state institutions, and governed an economy in which public salaries have often gone unpaid. Their claim to act for Palestine carries real popular power, and yet it also helps an armed authority mobilise recruits, silence rivals, and present every domestic opponent as an extension of foreign aggression. The maritime campaign serves regional solidarity, state-building, coercion, and internal legitimacy at the same time.
The United States and its allies answered the Red Sea attacks with naval patrols, interceptions, and bombing. The campaigns destroyed infrastructure and killed people inside Yemen but failed to remove the Houthi capacity to fire missiles and drones. In 2025, ACLED recorded only seven Houthi attacks on commercial vessels compared with 150 during 2024, while the movement increased long-range attacks elsewhere. Commercial traffic still did not return. Bab al-Mandab transits in June 2025 remained 65 percent below June 2023 levels because shipping companies had learned that a pause in launches was not the same as the removal of capability.
The Oman-brokered US-Houthi understanding of May 2025 stopped attacks on American vessels without resolving the conflict over other shipping. Washington negotiated protection for its own forces while leaving Saudi, European, and commercial exposure subject to separate calculations. The sea had several security regimes because the war had several negotiations.
When the Iran war began in 2026, the Houthis initially held back from a full maritime campaign. ACLED recorded six claimed attacks on Israeli territory between March 28 and April 6, with no reported damage or deaths, while Houthi leaders kept channels with Riyadh open. The Houthis had reason to hold back because a renewed Red Sea war risked Saudi bombing, an anti-Houthi ground offensive, and further American action while the movement was trying to convert military survival into political terms.
The balance broke in July after Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa airport and tensions over the return of Houthi officials from Tehran escalated. Houthi attacks then reached Saudi oil facilities, tankers, border cities, and military positions. Saudi aircraft struck sites in Sanaa, Hudaydah, Taiz, Marib, Al-Jawf, Saada, and Al-Bayda. On September 8, a large Houthi missile and drone attack wounded seventy-three people in Abha, Jazan, Najran, and Khamis Mushait, according to Saudi figures reported by the Associated Press. A Saudi strike on a prison in Al-Jawf killed twenty-three people, according to local health officials, while the identities and status of the dead remained unresolved.
The ground offensive began as those cross-border attacks intensified. Government positions in western Taiz and southern Hudaydah gave way under attacks using missiles, drones, vehicle-borne explosives, and infantry. The United Nations special envoy told the Security Council on September 10 that more than 11,400 households had been newly displaced since September 3, most from Taiz and southern Hudaydah. Civilians were reported killed across several governorates, children died when displacement sites in Marib were shelled, and the forces fighting for a global passage drove Yemenis from the road beside it.
The capture of Mayyun completed the immediate military sequence but did not settle the battle. Houthi units must hold an exposed island and a long coastal advance under Saudi air power. Government forces can regroup in Lahij and the south. Foreign navies can escort ships, intercept weapons, and strike launch sites. ACLED assessed before the fall of Mokha that neither side was likely to secure a quick decisive victory because Saudi-backed forces had become more capable and the Houthis faced greater risk than they had before the 2022 truce.
Territorial possession is still enough to change the calculation. Every attempt to retake Mayyun risks fighting around a narrow international channel. Every strike on Mokha risks the port, the airport, the coastal road, and the civilians who could not leave. The Houthis advanced because the sea gave the land more value, and Saudi Arabia must now decide how much of Yemen it will bomb to restore confidence in the route carrying its oil.
Four Security Orders in One Strait
Saudi Arabia announced a fourteen-member maritime defence coalition on July 30. The signatories included Bahrain, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey, and Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Forty-three states and the European Union attended the meeting, according to regional reporting, but only fourteen signed. The coalition established a Saudi headquarters and began operations from Jeddah under Saudi command in August.
The membership list shows the limits of the declaration. Egypt depends on Suez revenue. Djibouti sits across from Yemen and hosts foreign military bases. Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria offer political breadth and varying naval capacity. Sudan is in civil war, Somalia does not exercise secure authority across all its territory, and Yemen’s recognised government had lost the coast the coalition was organised to protect. A document can place fourteen flags beside one another without making their capabilities equal.
The United States did not join, although the US Fifth Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces retained operations in the region. The UAE stayed out despite its ports, commercial routes, former bases, and long military investment in southern Yemen. Oman, which had mediated between the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United States, also remained outside. Riyadh was building an Arab and wider Muslim maritime structure while the strongest Western navy, its former Emirati partner, and the principal regional mediator kept separate positions.
The European Union already operated Aspides, its defensive Red Sea mission. The United States had its own forces and agreements. Saudi Arabia now had a coalition. The Houthis operated a fourth order from the coast, issuing target rules and safe-passage notices backed by missiles. All claimed to protect or regulate navigation, all answered to different commands, and yet the captain of a commercial ship approaching from the Gulf of Aden had to cross the same water.
“Multipolarity” can make institutional confusion sound like a balanced world system. At Bab al-Mandab, several powers can impose costs and none can supply a settlement. Washington can strike Yemen but does not want to own another Yemeni war. Riyadh can assemble a coalition but cannot guarantee the ground beside the channel. Tehran can support the Houthis and benefit from pressure on Saudi exports while denying command over every Houthi decision. Beijing can maintain relations across the divide and obtain safer passage for some China-bound cargo without taking responsibility for securing the route for everyone.
The Sana’a Center has documented how Iranian support helped give the Houthis the weapons and expertise required for sustained maritime projection. Tehran benefits when pressure at Bab al-Mandab complements pressure at Hormuz. Strategic alignment falls short of operational command. The movement has local demands against Saudi Arabia, its own governing project, a history rooted in Yemen, and an ability to negotiate exemptions. Calling it a remote-controlled proxy makes Saudi Arabia’s eleven-year failure easier to explain, but it makes the actual adversary harder to understand.
Saudi Arabia calls its intervention support for legitimate government, but the government’s authority has repeatedly depended on Riyadh for finance, military coordination, diplomatic standing, and physical safety. Anti-Houthi units carried different political loyalties and answered through competing patronage chains. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi backed partners who sometimes fought one another, particularly around Aden and the south, while maintaining the language of a single national camp. The result was a recognised government with a flag, a seat at the United Nations, and no durable monopoly on organised force.
The foreign patrons built incompatible systems on the same territory. Iran helped one force acquire the means to threaten the sea. Saudi Arabia sponsored an opposing government without producing a coherent state. The UAE secured ports and islands through local partners whose political project challenged Yemeni unity. The United States defended shipping and armed Riyadh while separating maritime symptoms from political causes. Their projects collided at Bab al-Mandab because Yemen’s geography joined what their policies divided.
The Country Inside the Corridor
Nineteen-point-seven million Yemenis required humanitarian assistance at the start of 2026, according to UNICEF. The agency projected that 18.1 million people would face crisis-level food insecurity or worse, forty percent of health facilities were partly functioning or out of service, and about half a million children would suffer severe wasting. Yemen imports more than ninety percent of its staple food. Markets can remain open and sacks can remain on display, and yet a family without income cannot eat an available bag of flour.
Corridor security is usually reported from the deck of the ship rather than from the market receiving its cargo. Governments count barrels, insurers price hulls, naval commands record interceptions, and shipping firms calculate the additional fuel required for the Cape route. A Yemeni household encounters the same crisis as the price of wheat, cooking oil, diesel, transport, water pumping, and medicine. What the international system records as a delay can cost the household a meal.
Yemen also contains two economic systems. The Houthi authorities govern Sanaa and most of the population in the north and west. The recognised government operates from the south and east. Rival central banks, currencies, customs regimes, taxes, import rules, and political restrictions divide commerce before a truck leaves the port. A shipment landing at Hudaydah enters a different authority from one landing at Aden, and transport across front lines adds checkpoints, fees, risk, and delay. The sea route is one part of the cost, but the war collects payment at every stage after the cargo arrives.
The western coastal offensive passed through places already carrying displacement and hunger. IOM recorded 247 newly displaced households in Hudaydah between August 30 and September 5, including 129 in Al-Khawkhah and 118 in Hays, before the full scale of the Houthi advance became clear. Five days later, the UN special envoy cited reports of more than 11,400 newly displaced households across the country since September 3. Those figures covered households, not individuals, and they rose while the front was still moving.
Mokha is both a strategic port and a lived city. The August Houthi attack on it used drones, missiles, and vehicle-borne explosives, killed at least eleven people including three civilians, and damaged civilian and military infrastructure, according to ACLED. By early September, displaced women were carrying water containers in temporary shelter near the city while government and Houthi forces fought over the approaches. On September 11, Saudi aircraft struck the airport after Houthi forces took it. The runway joined the target list within a day of changing hands.
Across Yemen since 2015, a port has become military infrastructure because food and weapons can pass through it. A road becomes a military objective because it carries supplies and reinforcements. An airport becomes a legitimate target in the language of one belligerent because the other controls its flights. The civilian function never disappears, and yet each side treats the presence of an opposing force as permission to attack the structure on which civilians depend.
The Houthis describe their blockade as an answer to the Saudi blockade imposed on Yemen. The grievance is grounded in years of restrictions that constrained Sanaa airport, Hudaydah port, fuel imports, movement, medical travel, and the national economy. Their answer now places commercial crews and Yemeni import costs under another coercive system. Saudi Arabia describes its strikes as defence against missiles and protection of navigation. Its answer returns aircraft to provinces where homes, clinics, roads, and detention sites sit beside the military network it wants to destroy. Each belligerent presents the civilian cost as the consequence of the other side’s decision.
The World Food Programme warned on August 25 that disruption at Bab al-Mandab was hitting Yemen especially hard because the country imports ninety percent of its food. WFP reported twenty percent higher shipping costs for its own operations and thirty-five percent higher fuel costs for airdrops and humanitarian flights during the wider regional crisis. Every additional dollar spent moving assistance is a dollar unavailable for food, and international humanitarian funding was already falling before the coast became a front line.
The global and local wars meet in the clinic. Iran constricts Hormuz, Saudi Arabia reroutes oil to Yanbu, the Houthis target Saudi shipping, Riyadh assembles a naval coalition, Houthi forces seize the coast, Saudi aircraft return, commercial risk rises, and a Yemeni child arrives for treatment that depends on imported therapeutic food, medicine, electricity, and water. The child had no seat in the negotiations over Hormuz, no command in the battle for Mayyun, and no ownership interest in a tanker leaving Yanbu, and yet the entire structure arrives in the circumference of an upper arm.
The Gate After the Fall
Saudi Arabia can intensify the air campaign and support a ground counteroffensive to retake Dhubab and Mayyun, accepting the civilian and military cost of another coastal war. Naval escorts and interception could protect selected ships while leaving Houthi positions and their effect on insurance and route decisions in place. Negotiations would require Riyadh to seek limits on Houthi attacks from a weaker position and offer political or economic concessions.
The Houthis face their own limits. A rapid advance can outrun supply and command. Mayyun is exposed, the western coast lacks the protective terrain of the northern highlands, and Saudi aircraft can attack fixed positions more easily than mobile launchers. Holding the island also turns an instrument of pressure into territory that must be defended. If the Houthis mine the channel or attempt a broad closure, they risk a larger naval response and could lose the selective relationships that allowed some ships to pass.
The movement that Saudi Arabia entered Yemen to remove from Sanaa now holds Sanaa, Hudaydah, Mokha, Dhubab, and Mayyun. The internationally recognised government has received years of external military support and membership in a new maritime coalition, and yet it has retreated from the land that gives that coalition its purpose. Iran can benefit without formal ownership of Bab al-Mandab because Saudi Arabia and the United States must divert aircraft, ships, money, and political attention toward a second strait.
The fall of Mokha closes the distance between Yemen’s internal settlement and global energy security. Diplomats could once discuss a truce, salary payments, ports, roads, and prisoner exchanges as a contained Yemeni file while naval commanders handled the Red Sea. The authority governing the coast will influence the conditions under which ships pass, and the conditions of passage will become part of every negotiation about the Yemeni state.
The unanswered Yemeni question is who has the right to make that bargain. The Houthis command the strongest armed organisation and govern most Yemenis without an electoral mandate. The Presidential Leadership Council holds international recognition but depends on foreign support and has failed to unify the forces acting in its name. Southern separatism survived the declared dissolution of the STC because its political cause cannot be abolished by announcement. Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, and the United States possess the power to prolong or constrain the war, but none can confer consent on a Yemeni settlement.
Bab al-Mandab translates that crisis of authority into a price the world can see. A ship can reroute, an insurer can raise a premium, and an oil ministry can shift barrels between terminals. Yemenis cannot sail around their own country. They remain inside the competing jurisdictions, broken institutions, armed checkpoints, import systems, and bombing zones created by a war in which every outside power pursued security through a different Yemeni partner. The runway on Mayyun was built to secure the strait, and on September 11 its intended enemy took it.