Saudi, Yemeni forces launch counteroffensive to retake Mokha from Houthis

Analysts warn Houthis likely to escalate attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure

Saudi and Yemeni forces pressed a ground counteroffensive against Houthi fighters Monday, officials said, pushing north along Yemen’s Red Sea coast in a flanking operation aimed at retaking the strategic port city of Mokha. Around 100 jet fighters provided air cover to Yemeni ground troops in the dawn operation, said Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen. The forces are seeking to ease the threat the Houthis pose to energy exports through the narrow Bab al-Mandeb strait.

“We executed a flanking operation to gain control over the Bab al-Mandeb Strait,” Col. Majid al-Nuzaili, a Yemeni military spokesman, said in a social-media post. He said the operation included Emirati-backed pro-government forces known as the Giants Brigades and had succeeded in gaining control over the strait, but that claim could not be independently confirmed.

The Houthis seized Mokha last month and used the position to attack Saudi energy facilities and threaten Saudi ship traffic through the strait, the 18-mile-wide entrance to the Red Sea. The offensive is the latest chapter in fighting that has grown into the worst in Yemen in years, fueled by the broader war between the United States and Iran. The conflict has heightened risks to global energy flows after Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March caused what the WSJ described as the worst oil-supply jolt in recent history.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Monday: “The Saudis have come under Houthi attack and see the threat that that poses, and they have a right to defend themselves. And obviously the Yemeni forces are going to try to retake territory that they were ousted from.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked President Trump for military help against the Houthis last month, but Trump has limited U.S. involvement to providing intelligence and other indirect support, according to a U.S. military official. Analysts said opening another active military front against the group risks overextending U.S. forces and deepening risks to international shipping. The Houthis have largely avoided targeting American or international commercial ships in the region following a 2025 ceasefire with the U.S.

Analysts said the Houthis are likely to respond to the latest offensive with new attacks on Saudi Arabia, including on its energy infrastructure. “The Houthis are definitely going to escalate,” said Adam Baron, a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington who specializes in Yemen and the Persian Gulf. “They want to push back against their losses by striking Saudi to show they still have the capacity to disrupt the kingdom’s economy.”

U.S. and Gulf officials said Iran was losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, with millions of barrels of oil passing through the waterway each day. The U.S. has grown more confident its naval blockade of Hormuz is having a severe effect on the Iranian economy, those officials said.

The Saudi-backed ground operation relies on Yemeni fighting units that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates armed and trained at earlier stages of the civil war, when the conflict ground to a bloody stalemate. The Houthis are among an array of militia groups throughout the Middle East that receive weapons and training from Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as part of Tehran’s strategy to project power in the region, but they had remained largely on the sidelines of the war between the U.S. and Iran until a ceasefire in Yemen unraveled in July.

The Yemen war began in 2014, when the Houthis swept into Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. A Saudi-led coalition entered the war on behalf of Yemen’s internationally recognized government in 2015. The conflict has killed more than 150,000 people, displaced millions and pushed the Arab world’s poorest nation to the brink of famine. A tentative ceasefire had held in recent years as Saudi Arabia paid the salaries of Yemeni government officials, including those in Sana’a, even as the Houthis attacked Israel and struck ships in the Red Sea during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

When the Houthis began their new offensive in early September, they quickly swept into Mokha and took Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow southern mouth of the Red Sea. That gave the Iranian-backed rebels a means to squeeze Saudi oil exports, which already had been upended by a drone attack from Iraq — allegedly by Tehran-supported forces — that hit the kingdom’s crucial East-West oil pipeline.