>In the last week, Houthi forces killed a merchant mariner, sunk a commercial ship and forced a crew to abandon another in flames. The attacks come as the Houthis continue to escalate its eight-month campaign against commercial traffic in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
>Comparative data from Marine Traffic suggests that the Houthi attacks have led to a 79.6 percent drop in drybulk carriers going through the Suez Canal in June 2024 versus June 2023. The recent attacks and sinking of Tutor is expected to lead to an additional rise in insurance costs for companies planning to send ships through the Red Sea.
Off-topic: in the photo lede at the top of the article, are the rescued merchant mariners wearing standard eye/ear protection or is something else going on? Based on how they are holding the shoulder of the person in front of them, it almost looks like they are blindfolded.
It would look really bad to lose someone after landing on the carrier.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is a loud, confusing, and dangerous place. I imagine they were told something like "this is not a time or place for sightseeing. hang on to the person in front of you and they'll lead you to a safe place below decks".
I can see what you mean, but if you zoom all the way in on the man looking into the camera, you can just see their left eye (right from our perspective). I think this is a buddy-system safety measure for crossing an unfamiliar, loud, hectic, and hazardous environment.
Not really. They have survived very large scale US-Saudi bombing campaigns in the past and managed to maintain deterrence against Saudi infrastructure throughout, so unless the US invades in foot there will be no more finding out. And of course, if the US does, it will likely also do a significant amount of "finding out".
You place too much trust in U.S. troops. They invaded Afghanistan, spent twenty years and trillions of dollars, and left it like they were never there. It's like an expensive vacation where they forgot the souvenirs!
This has caused the UAE and Israel to implement a trans-shipment land-bridge as a trial run for IMEC [0] and the IN-UAE segment should be operationalized in the next 3 months.
Not much incentive for Gulf States to deal with the Houthis when this basically forces shippers to use an alpha version of the IMEC.
If only they could get the trucknet folk to extend IMEC a little to the east, across the Kra Isthmus, IMEC could be rebranded as "Two Belts, Two Roads"?
"these guys" are pawns of Iran. There is no political will to rock the fuel prices boat before election (US even threatened Ukraine with stopping support for attacking russian refineries). US doesnt run sorties on Iranian rocket factories, only Israel did few limited raids. Destroy Iranian factories and supply of rockets will stop.
You're being ridiculous. American military spending has produced enough power to defeat this many times over. You have the power to invade and occupy the country, you have the power to indiscriminately destroy trucks and civilian infrastructure that might be transporting missiles, you have the power to enforce a total blockade, there are many helpful things you could do.
The problem is, of course, that you don't want to for the very sensible reason that it would be a political and humanitarian nightmare.
> The Houthis first attacked commercial ships connected to Israel, expanding to those with ties to the U.S. and United Kingdom following coordinated strikes by the two countries, in partnership with other nations. The Yemen-based group then began to attack any ship going to or from Israel, as well, before declaring they would attack nearly any commercial ship transiting through the Red Sea, as well the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, USNI News previously reported. The Houthis have also claimed they would target some ships in the Mediteranean Sea.
Genuine question: are the Houthis sufficiently organized to make a credible statement like this? It's clear that they have modern weapons, but relatively little reporting has clarified a reporting structure that would give any person doing international shipping the trust they would likely need to believe that kind of public statement.
Empirically, no. The Houthi's do not have a good track record in this conflict of hitting only Israel affiliated ships.
There have been some accusations of Iran providing intelligence support. Iran probably does have the capabilities to do so. However Iran denies providing such support. And, even if they were trying to do so, they are empircally not doing that good of a job.
> Genuine question: are the Houthis sufficiently organized to make a credible statement like this?
I imagine nowadays you can check "list all ships that have itineraries leaving [an Israeli port] to [anywhere]" online, and knowing a ship identifier track its reported position and progress on a handy little map until it's in range for scouting and attack. (Unless the crew does some transponder malarkey.)
So I'd expect any "they didn't hit who they said they'd hit" controversy will involve disagreements over the "true" ownership or itinerary.
> I imagine nowadays you can check "did this ship recently depart an Israeli port" in a few minutes online, and then see its approximate position and progress on a map. (Unless the crew does some transponder malarkey.)
I tried this with the two ships in the article, and couldn't get a definitive answer. One of the ships hasn't had an online update since well over a month ago, when it was in SE Asia. Maybe there's a paid option that gives more detail or newer updates.
(But this doesn't answer the underlying question: is there a reason to believe that the Houthis have a command structure that is capable of stopping opportunistic attacks?)
> Maybe there's a paid option that gives more detail or newer updates.
Or one of the Houthi rebels has a cousin who works in the industry and can query a not-so-public/free database.
Either way, I'm saying it's not quite as tangled or secret as, say, banking privacy or corporate ownership structures, especially since big cargo ships are hard to hide when they come into any port.
Sure, I agree it’s information they can get. But the larger point was that “the Houthis have sufficient intelligence” is a moot statement if the Houthis don’t have a command structure that prevents random cells from attacking whoever they please. An adjacent thread pointed out that at least one unrelated Russian ship appears to have learnt this the hard way.
I'd recommend reading the Wiki on them. [1] They're not a terrorist organization in the sense that you're thinking. They were an opposition movement in Yemen. Yemen decided to crack down on them, this led to their opposition turning into an insurrection and sparking a civil war. The Houthis defeated not only the government of Yemen but also Saudi Arabia who joined the party. They now have stable control over a large part of Yemen, including all of its western land facing the Suez Canal.
They were designated a terrorist organization at the tail end of Trump's presidency, presumably to garner favor with Saudi Arabia. Biden then removed that designation as relations between Saudi Arabia and US deteriorated. He then put them back on it after they chose to intervene in the Israeli War. In this case it seems the designation is mostly political - not the sort you might associate with loosely clad terror cells that run around blowing random people up.
There have only been two US media reported incidents where they targeted an inappropriate ship, and the truth is not entirely clear in both cases, as both come down to there being a discrepancy or time lag between real ownership and the updating of the public naval sources. And in one of those two cases the ship was also not even damaged, but had some missiles fired over it, and was then followed briefly by several, presumably Houth-linked, small vessels. Presumably there was ongoing communication between the vessel and the Houthis in the interim.
>God is the Greatest
>Death to America
>Death to Israel
>A Curse Upon the Jews
>Victory to Islam
In Arabic.
We're literally watching them, frankly effectively indiscriminately because of the staggering levels of incompetence in targetting, attack civilian vessels in international waters and murder merchant mariners.
The Houthis should clearly be designated a terrorist organisation.
As I understand it, the problem is that when designated as terrorists, getting aid to Yemenis in Houthi-controlled areas is extremely difficult because you can't give it to the Houthis and you can't give it to them yourselves because of the Houthis.
So when the Houthis are correctly labelled, a lot of Yemenis die because the Houthis do not give a shit and so the Yemenis civilians starve to death without aid.
While they initially claimed that they were only targeting Israeli ships they quickly switched to attacking any ship crossing the strait regardless of flag, ownership, source or destination.
Probably if they 100% adhered to that, it would work the other way - proving there's someone who has enough oversight and control. I can't find easily if all the ships targeted so far matched the definition, but I'd be interested if anyone knows this.
>Comparative data from Marine Traffic suggests that the Houthi attacks have led to a 79.6 percent drop in drybulk carriers going through the Suez Canal in June 2024 versus June 2023. The recent attacks and sinking of Tutor is expected to lead to an additional rise in insurance costs for companies planning to send ships through the Red Sea.