Bab al-Mandab falls to Ansarallah as Yemen’s war turns on Riyadh

Riyadh’s fragmented proxy forces have lost Yemen’s western coast, leaving one of the world’s most coveted waterways in the hands of the movement the kingdom spent a decade trying to defeat.

Mawadda Iskandar SEP 15, 2026

In just 36 hours, the military architecture established by the Saudi-led coalition along Yemen’s western coast since the start of its 2015 war collapsed in succession. Mokha fell first. Positions and operational axes then gave way southward toward Dhubab and Bab al-Mandab, followed by the strategic islands scattered across the southern Red Sea. 

The rout formed part of a wider Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) operation named “And Allah is greater in might and stronger in punishment.” Sanaa said the offensive completed the earlier “Breaking the Siege” campaign and brought roughly 5,400 square kilometers across six districts of Taiz and Hodeidah governorates under its control. 

The road to Mokha

The advance on Mokha began in western rural Taiz, where Sanaa’s forces seized the heights overlooking Al-Kadaha, Maqbanah, and the roads running toward Al-Barh, above all Jabal al-Numan. They then widened their deployment across Jabal Habashi and the adjoining highlands in the direction of Al-Waziiyah. 

As the advance gathered pace, the interior routes feeding the coast came under observation and fire control, stripping the coastal line of the depth on which it had long depended.

Kadaha proved the decisive hinge because it commands the main Taiz–Mokha road, which had served as the principal supply artery for the coastal front. Its capture severed one of the coalition’s most important links between the inland city and the Red Sea and opened the way for Sanaa’s forces to move through the Jabal Habashi countryside. Control of the surrounding high ground then made any attempt to restore the route far more difficult.

Pressure spread from Kadaha toward Souq al-Birein and Jabal al-Khuda before bearing down on Barh, the forward junction connecting Mokha with Yemen’s interior. Once Sanaa tightened its grip on these axes, the coalition’s positions across western Taiz began to lose contact with the coastal command. What had been a chain of mutually supporting defenses became a string of exposed outposts.

The Ansarallah-aligned YAF simultaneously opened the Hays–Khokha axis and advanced through Waziiyah and Mawza toward Mokha. The advance was no longer approaching the coast along a single line. Coalition units came under pressure from several directions at once, while the roads behind them were steadily narrowed or cut. Their capacity to hold the front quickly began to disintegrate.

Speaking to The Cradle, Colonel Abdullah Mutahhar, a military and strategic expert, says Yemeni forces took command of the theater from Hays to Khokha before moving onto the Yemeni islands, including the main Hanish islands and Mayyun, and establishing control over Bab al-Mandab and the adjoining coast.

He says units were deployed to fronts from which coalition troops had been pulled to secure the waterways, particularly the strait. According to Mutahhar, Sanaa had sought to avoid another internal battle on the coast or in Marib and Al-Jawf, but Riyadh mobilized its allied formations. 

Mutahhar argues that those forces can no longer prevent Sanaa from consolidating its gains. The scale of the advance without air cover, he adds, showed that Saudi airpower could punish the attacking force but could neither restore the lost ground nor repair the coalition’s broken command structure.

Riyadh’s proxy army comes apart 

As the coastal positions fell, Saudi- and UAE-backed units withdrew from Hays, Khokha, Waziiyah, and Mawza toward Mokha. The most prominent were Tariq Saleh’s formations, assembled with Emirati support around fighters drawn from forces once loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. 

They fought alongside the southern Salafist Giants Brigades and local units that included elements linked to the Islah Party. Saleh’s forces had moved into Riyadh’s orbit after the UAE’s role receded in Yemen, while other formations remained tied to competing patrons and commanders. These divided loyalties prevented the coalition from building a unified front and helped turn retreat into collapse.

The advance brought old accusations back to the surface. Commanders blamed one another for abandoning positions, withholding reinforcements, and leaving neighboring units exposed. Tensions between Tariq Saleh and Islah again moved into the open, but no joint operations room had the authority to impose a common plan on formations built by different sponsors for different political ends.

As Saleh’s units retreated and his influence along the coast shrank, Saudi Arabia tried to reorder the chain of command in Mokha and the surrounding districts. The attempt came after Sanaa’s forces had already driven the front into the city’s outskirts. 

Riyadh was no longer dealing with the loss of a few forward positions. It faced the harder task of rebuilding a defensive system whose roads, high ground, commanders, and political cohesion had all failed together.

Ali al-Imad, a member of Ansarallah’s Political Bureau, says Saudi Arabia presented the war as a civil conflict even though the battlefield exposed the fragility of the forces on which it relied. These formations, he argues, remained divided by party, sect, region, and patron:

“More than 100,000 of these troops were killed, fled, or surrendered in less than a week, and Yemeni forces recovered around 5,400 square kilometers despite direct Saudi participation and the intensity of the airstrikes, which produced no results on the ground because the forces were dispersed.”

On command, Imad draws a sharp distinction between the two camps. The YAF moved under a single leadership with organized capabilities, while secrecy surrounding the operation preserved surprise. Once the gains were secured, units repositioned as far as the Bab al-Mandab islands.

In his assessment, the opposing forces’ collapse and Sanaa’s new deployment have placed the lost areas beyond any quick counteroffensive.

The fall of Mokha sent Sanaa’s forces south toward Dhubab. The last major land positions separating them from Bab al-Mandab then collapsed, and the battle shifted beyond the seizure of the coastline itself. Yemen’s forces had reached the southern entrance to the Red Sea, where control of a few narrow channels carries consequences far beyond the local front.

The YAF took Mayyun, also known as Perim, the island in the center of the strait that divides the shipping passage into two channels. Its western shore lies roughly 20 kilometers from the African coast. Possession of the island places Yemeni forces inside the waterway itself, astride one of the most important maritime chokepoints linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The advance continued across the offshore chain. Sanaa seized Zuqar and consolidated control over Greater and Lesser Hanish, extending its military presence from the mainland into the Red Sea. The result is an arc running from Hodeidah through Mokha and Dhubab to Mayyun, Zuqar, and the Hanish islands. 

For years, this same geography served as one of the Saudi–Emirati coalition’s most valuable military holdings in Yemen. Its loss now places the coalition’s former coastal infrastructure in the hands of its principal enemy.

Ansarallah’s arrival at Bab al-Mandab gives Sanaa direct leverage over one of global trade’s most sensitive arteries. The strait forms the southern gateway to the Red Sea and the shortest maritime route between the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, and Europe. 

A force positioned around its channels can shape vessel movements, insurance premiums, freight costs, and supply schedules without formally closing the passage. The stakes rise further when this pressure is paired with Iran’s control over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 

The Yemeni coast has therefore entered a wider equation spanning the two gates through which Gulf energy and Asian–European trade reach the world.

Mutahhar describes the capture of Bab al-Mandab as a gain for Yemen and the Axis of Resistance, arguing that the strait can serve as leverage if the US or Israel attacks another state within the axis. Estimates commonly place the waterway’s share at around 10–12 percent of global maritime trade, although the proportions vary sharply between container traffic, oil, gas, and total merchandise. 

He warns that simultaneous pressure at Bab al-Mandab and Hormuz could affect around 40 percent of oil trade and food supplies. That combined 40 percent figure is his estimate rather than a settled measure; official energy data track oil and gas flows through each passage separately. For Mutahhar, Yemen now holds several options for answering any new regional assault.

The war reaches Saudi Arabia

The ground offensive on the western coast unfolded alongside strikes on the Saudi interior. Riyadh expanded its air campaign as its allied positions gave way, intensifying raids on Taiz, Hodeidah, Marib, Jawf, Saada, and Al-Bayda in an effort to support the retreating forces. 

Sanaa answered by targeting bases, airports, and other critical sites across Jizan, Najran, and Asir – territories historically claimed by Yemen. The strikes reached King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait, King Fahd Air Base in Taif, the airports of Abha and Jizan, and Aramco-linked facilities. The Yemeni leadership cast the campaign in the language it has used throughout the renewed confrontation: “siege for siege” and “escalation for escalation.”

The pressure on Saudi energy infrastructure extends well beyond military bases. Facilities in Jizan have come under attack, while the kingdom’s 1,200-kilometer East–West Pipeline – the principal route carrying crude from the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea while bypassing Hormuz – was forced offline after a separate drone strike. 

The pipeline outage revived memories of the Abqaiq and Khurais strikes of 2019 and exposed the cost of defending oil infrastructure stretched between Hormuz and the Red Sea. Recent assessments place the endangered flow through the line at as much as four percent of global supply.

On the eastern front, Sanaa’s forces targeted Al-Wadea and Sharurah, two nodes connecting Saudi territory with eastern Yemen. Pressure on Al-Jubah, Al-Abdiyah, and positions around Marib coincided with attacks on Jawf, while strikes on supply routes and rear bases further burdened the forces defending the approaches from the east. 

In the latest escalation, the YAF said it had targeted Sharurah and then King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait with dozens of missiles and drones. They claimed the attack reached aircraft hangars, radar systems, runways, and ammunition depots after more than 300 Saudi raids in five days. 

Hamid Abdul Qadir Antar, an advisor to the Yemeni prime minister’s office, tells The Cradle that the strikes deep inside Saudi Arabia were “painful and precise,” adding that Yemen still retains a target bank that includes oil facilities, desalination and power plants, airports, and ports.

The pressure is clearest in the kingdom’s oil sector. Saudi Arabia told OPEC that crude production had fallen to 6.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in August from 10.9 million in February, its lowest level in more than three decades. 

Antar argues that Saudi airstrikes will not reverse the battlefield and that Riyadh’s way out runs through Sanaa’s longstanding terms: lifting the siege, opening airports and ports, paying compensation, withdrawing from Yemeni territory, and ending interference in the country’s affairs.

The coast reopens under Sanaa

Sanaa’s forces say the operation began at Kadaha, west of Taiz, and ran for roughly a week before expelling Saudi-backed formations from broad stretches of the coast. The speed of the attack left the coalition with little time to establish a second line, while the movement’s control of inland junctions made an orderly withdrawal increasingly difficult.

After consolidating its gains, Sanaa reopened roads that years of war had closed. These included the Taiz–Hodeidah road and the Barh–Waziiyah, Barh–Mokha, and Hays–Khokha axes. It also announced a general amnesty for fighters who laid down their weapons. 

Sources reported hundreds of prisoners, around 3,500 beneficiaries of the amnesty, and the surrender of units on Greater and Lesser Hanish and Jabal Zuqar. The reopening of the routes also served a military purpose, allowing Sanaa to move forces and supplies across a coastal system that had previously been divided by coalition positions.

The captured infrastructure reveals the scale of the coastal system that fell. It includes command and operations centers, the Saudi headquarters in Mokha, Mokha Airport, Emirati-built airfields and military runways, naval bases, coastguard positions, and the Abu Musa al-Ashari, Al-Mahjar, Al-Omari, and Khalid bin al-Walid camps. 

The YAF also took radar and surveillance sites, air defense positions, Mayyun’s runway, and installations on the islands opposite the coast. Footage showed Saudi and Emirati vehicles and weapons abandoned across the front, among them tanks, artillery, hundreds of armed vehicles, and Kornet and TOW missiles. Beyond their immediate military value, these assets document how deeply Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had embedded themselves along Yemen’s Red Sea shore.

The march toward Marib

With the western coast largely secured, attention has shifted to Marib. The governorate remains the main military and political center for Saudi-aligned forces in northern Yemen and sits beside the country’s most important oil and gas infrastructure, including the Marib–Jawf fields, the Safer complex, and Marib refinery. 

Its capture would remove Riyadh’s largest remaining forward base from the northern war and deprive the coalition of the hub from which it has managed fronts stretching from Jawf to Shabwa. It would also open an eastern line for Sanaa toward the energy-producing districts and the Saudi border. 

Movement around Marib began before any direct push into the city, with advances through Al-Jubah and Abdiyah and efforts to secure positions opening the road toward Al-Balaq. The western and northwestern approaches remain active, forcing defenders to prepare for an assault across several axes.

Antar says Yemeni control of the coastal strip, Mokha, and Bab al-Mandab has changed the character of the war. He maintains that the strait remains open to international shipping but closed to Saudi vessels until the siege is lifted. 

That selective restriction, if enforced, would turn the waterway into a direct instrument of pressure on Riyadh while avoiding the political cost of declaring a general blockade. Antar adds that Yemen’s leadership intends to continue what it calls the liberation of the country and the removal of Saudi-backed forces. In that sequence, he says, Marib is the next destination in the campaign to complete Sanaa’s control over the northern governorates.

Imad likewise says the next phase will pursue what Ansarallah calls the liberation project. Sanaa, he insists, will accept no foreign military presence on Yemeni soil and will confront any new Saudi buildup. On the political track, he says, “Riyadh has grown accustomed to reneging on agreements, but peace is the most effective and only solution for ending the battle.” 

Continued war and siege, in his view, will drive the cost still higher for Saudi Arabia. The latest escalation could have been avoided had Riyadh accepted the roadmap agreement, he argues, while the strikes inside the kingdom and the recapture of Mokha Airport came as a direct answer to the renewed war.

Saudi Arabia must now pay the political and economic price of the conflict, he concludes, rather than continue trying to settle it on the battlefield.