The War is Going Great

It looks like the Houthis are on a roll on the Arabian peninsula with attacks bombed the cross Arabia crude oil pipeline, forcing a shutdown.

A drone attack launched from Iraqi territory led Saudi Arabia to shut down a critical oil pipeline on Friday, heightening fears that widening clashes in the region could further disrupt energy supplies. The global price of oil briefly jumped to about $110 a barrel.

The Saudi Arabian Energy Ministry said that the shutdown of the East-West pipeline, an increasingly vital means to shuttle oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, was a precautionary measure. The country’s foreign ministry said it would not immediately retaliate at the request of the Iraqi government, which said it would work to find the source of the attack.

Yeah, it was some random dude in Iraq. Just a few days after the Houthis hit Jazan on the red sea coast just north of Yemen.  Yeah, sure.

In the mean time, in actions that don't have a smidgen of plausible reliability, the Houthis have seized almost all of the country's west coast, including strategic islands at the mouth of this body of water, meaning that they have control of anything entering the Red Sea.

This given the volume of trade that goes through Suez, this is significant.

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia seized an island in a choke point of the Red Sea after days of fierce fighting, two Yemeni government officials said Friday, giving Iran and its allies sway over the two main routes for shipping oil out of the Middle East.

The capture of Perim Island came as Saudi Arabia announced that it had shut down a critical oil pipeline, a day after Houthi forces swept into the strategic port city of Mokha in Yemen. Both were major setbacks for the Saudi kingdom, which exports most of its oil through the Red Sea. The kingdom’s foreign ministry said the pipeline was hit on Thursday by drones launched from Iraq.

Perim Island sits in the middle of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow pathway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Its seizure adds a new dimension in the war between the United States and Iran. The Islamic republic has already largely cut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and leveraged that influence to demand concessions from Washington.

Now, the Houthi militia, Iran’s ally, has a foothold at a bottleneck in the Red Sea and could further disrupt shipping there.

The United States is losing the war even more now.