September 12, 2024: Merchant ships in the Red Sea are still being attacked by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Nations that the attacked ships belong to demand that their governments dispatch warships to protect their ships. Since Iran supplies missiles, the Houthis are using, they expect the Houthis to not attack ships belonging to countries, like Russia and China, that Iran depends on for weapons or assistance in bypassing the economic sanctions imposed on Iran. Russian ships use their electronic ID systems as well as visible flags indicating Russian ownership or ships chartered by Russia. The Houthis fired on some Russian ships anyway.

Since 2015 Iran has supplied the Houthi rebels with 430 ballistic missiles and 851 explosives equipped drones for attacks on neighboring Saudi Arabia. The longer range ballistic missiles were used to hit Saudi oil facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The Saudi had received the Patriot missile defense system and purchased hundreds of Patriot missiles to shoot down most of the Houthis missiles. Since 2015 the Saudi Patriot system crews have gained more combat experience than anyone else. The Ukrainian may eventually catch up as they receive more Patriot missiles. Since late 2023 the Houthis have been firing their cruise missiles at ships in the Red Sea. The wartime activity has brought many warships and air patrols to the Red Sea and that has halted Iranian missile smuggling efforts.

Iran supplied weapons and technical advisors to teach the Houthis how to handle complex weapons systems like ballistic and anti-ship missiles. The Houthis fired a bunch of ballistic missiles at their enemies in that time, generally Saudi cities and oil facilities. Saudi Arabia has lots of American Patriot anti- missiles systems and few of the Houthi attacks managed to hit targets in Saudi Arabia. Until late 2023 the Iranian missiles were meant to be used against Saudi Arabia. This is a classic example of nations using an eager intermediate to carry out attacks against an enemy. If the missiles were fired from Iran, it would be seen as an act of war that could escalate to a major conflict involving western forces. That would be more than Iran could handle. Having the Houthi militia use these weapons against Iran’s enemies shielded Iran from retribution.

There are some problems with this arrangement. The Houthis assigned to launch these missiles at ships moving north towards the Suez Canal have been told to fire on all ships within range while ignoring ships belonging to Russia or China. Despite this, some Russian and Chinese ships are still attacked. The Houthis take their orders from Iran, so Russia and China have to ask Iran to contact the Iranian advisors working with the Houthis to deal with the problem. It’s unclear if Iran has been able to restrain the Houthi missile crews to stop firing on ships belonging to Iranian allies. In the past the Houthis have been unruly and difficult to control, even Iranian personnel in Yemen working with the Houthis. The Houthis are heavily armed and quick to fire on anyone they feel is threatening them. The Houthis are still involved in an eleven-year old rebellion against the Yemen government and that fight is their main priority. The Houthi men manning the anti-ship missiles and bomb boats are often not entirely sure when trying to identify who passing ships belong to. Apparently, the Houthis missile crews are firing on everyone because it’s easier.

The Houthis declared war on Israel after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israelis and other foreigners visiting a music festival near the Gaza Israeli border. Hamas killed over a thousand people, most of them civilians. The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) then invaded Gaza and Hamas has been on the run ever since. That was when the Houthis declared war on Israel and opened fire on ships passing through the Red Sea.

The current round of Houthis violence against commercial shipping heading for the Suez Canal or making deliveries to Red Sea countries has led to over a half a dozen NATO nations sending warships to protect cargo ships in the Red Sea, by making ineffectual attacks on the Houthi rebels and their Iranian missiles in Yemen. American warships and naval aviation have already used hundreds of missiles against Houthi targets in Yemen. This has diminished the Houthi attacks but not entirely eliminated them. That would purportedly take a ground war in Yemen. The Israelis showed how effectual air attacks could be made on the Houthis when the latter attacked Israel with ballistic and cruise missiles. For over a decade the Houthis have been leading a rebellion against the Yemen government. In response, other Arab nations sharing the Arabian Peninsula with Yemen sent troops to assist in suppressing the Houthis. The Americans even offered to send an assault ship with a battalion of marines on board. Nothing ever came of this.

Before the Houthi missile crisis, the Red Sea and the adjacent Gulf of Aden had a piracy problems which were suppressed. Violence against commercial shipping is nothing new in the Gulf of Aden, which is between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Opposite Yemen, across the Red Sea, is the African nation of Somalia and the infamous Somali pirates. The resurgence of piracy in this area began in 2010 when it had reached levels of activity not seen in over a century. But over the next three years that all changed. By 2013 attacks on ships by Somali pirates had declined 95 percent from the 2010 peak. The rapid collapse of the Somali pirates since 2010 was no accident. It was all a matter of organization, international cooperation and innovation. It all began back in 2009 when 80 seafaring nations formed, with the help of a UN resolution, the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia. The most visible aspect of the Contact Group was the organization of an anti-piracy patrol off the Somali coast. This came to consist of over two dozen warships and several dozen manned and unmanned aircraft, as well as support from space satellites and major intelligence and police agencies.

Back in 2010 the Somali pirates got most of the publicity but they only carried out 44 percent of the attacks. What was newsworthy was that the Somalis accounted for 90 percent of the hijackings, and some 80 percent of the piracy was in and around the Indian Ocean. Some 44 percent of all attacks involved the pirates boarding the ships, while in 18 percent the pirates just fired on ships, without getting aboard. There are still pirates out there, but they are more into robbery than kidnapping.

Piracy hit a trough from the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth. That was because the Great Powers had pretty much divided up the whole planet and policed it. The pirates had no place to hide. Piracy began to revive in a modest way beginning in the 1970s, with the collapse of many post-colonial governments. At the same time there were problems defining what exactly an act of piracy was. What most people agree on is that piracy is non-state sanctioned use of force at sea or from the sea. This could include intercepting a speedboat to rob the passengers, but that's usually just thought of as armed robbery. And something like the seizure of the Achille Lauro in 1985 is considered terrorism, rather than piracy. In the past, some marginal states have sanctioned piratical operations, like the Barbary States, but that rarely occurs these days. There has been more since 2001. For example, in 1991 there were about 120 known cases of real or attempted piracy. In 1994 that increased to more than 200 cases. In 2000 there were 471 cases, in 2005 there were 359 and by 2010 there were over 400.

The international effort to suppress Somali piracy halted and reversed this trend. But while there have been far fewer attacks off Somalia, there was a sevenfold increase since 2009 in the Straits of Malacca and a similar increase off Nigeria. The big difference is that only off Somalia could ships and crews be taken and held for ransom for long periods. Everywhere else the pirates were usually only interested in quickly robbing the crew and stealing anything portable that they could get into their small boats. Off the Nigerian coast pirates sometimes take some ship officers with them to hold for ransom or force the crew to move small tankers to remote locations where most of the oil cargo can be transferred to another ship and sold on the black market.

Pirates usually function on the margins of society, trying to get a cut of the good life in situations where there aren't many options. This is usually in areas where state control is weakest or absent, in failing and failed states. A failing state is something like Nigeria, Indonesia, or the Philippines, where the government is managing to keep things together but is faced with serious problems with areas that are sometimes out of control. In a failed state like, where there isn't a government at all, pirates can do whatever they want.

The solution to piracy is essentially on land; go into uncontrolled areas and institute governance. This has been the best approach since the Romans eliminated piracy in the Mediterranean over 2,000 years ago. Trying to tackle piracy on the maritime end can reduce the incidence of piracy but can't eliminate it because pirates usually have safe bases on land. In the modern world the land solution often can't be implemented. Who wants to put enough troops into Somalia to eliminate piracy? And failing states are likely to be very sensitive about their sovereignty if you offer to help them control marginal areas.

Meanwhile there are two areas where pirates still thrive, the Bight of Benin off Nigeria, and the Straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Singapore. Nigeria produces oil while most of the world’s oil passes through the Straits of Malacca. Piracy there is largely an Indonesian phenomenon. It bothers the Singaporeans a lot, the Malaysians a little, and the Indonesians not much. But as Indonesia began stabilizing itself after the 2004 Aceh Peace settlement, the institution of a more democratic government and defeating Islamic terrorism. When that happened the number of piracy attacks declined. This decline was facilitated by the combined police effort of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia itself, which didn't come about until a lot of issues among the three states were resolved. Neither Indonesia nor Malaysia were all that upset about smuggling. Indonesia and Singapore still have some problems, as Singapore more or less encourages sand stealing in enormous volumes from Indonesia. Since 2010 there has been an increase in piracy off Indonesia, largely because the Indonesians reduced their anti-piracy patrols without warning or explanation. There are lots of targets, with over 50,000 large ships moving through the Straits of Malacca each year. That’s 120-150 a day. Lots of targets. The shallow and tricky waters in the strait forces the big ships to go slow enough, under 30 kilometers an hour, for speed boats to catch them.

The Iran-backed Shia Houthi rebels are losing but refuse to make peace, in part because of continued Iranian support and partly out of fear of the consequences. Yemen has proved to be an embarrassment for Iran and the Saudi/UAE backed Yemen government. The other Arabs are not willing to suffer the heavy casualties a quick victory over the Houthis would require. The war will drag on into 2025 or until Iran just decides to halt support. Iranian withdrawal is a possibility because of growing popular protests in Iran against the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Despite that, Iran keeps smuggling in more and more weapons. These are not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war, though sometimes they are used for that anyway, but for use against targets designated by Iran.

Until late 2017 there was not much progress in the Yemen fighting, a development that favored Iran. But by early 2018 the Shia rebel coalition began unraveling and Iran suddenly had its own domestic uprising to deal with back home. Worse, the U.S. government had changed in early 2017 and was much more aggressive dealing with Iran. There was also a radical, for Arabia, new government in Saudi Arabia with a young Crown Prince in charge and organizing more effective resistance to Iranian aggression. That played a role in causing the Yemen unrest evolving into a full-scale civil war in 2015. That was when Shia rebels sought to take control of the entire country. Neighboring Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, quickly formed a military coalition to halt the Yemeni rebel advance. The Arab coalition succeeded and by 2016 pro-government forces were closing in on the rebel-held capital. The coalition did not go after the capital itself because of expected heavy casualties and property damage in the city. The coalition concentrated on rebuilding the Yemeni armed forces, recruiting allies from the Sunni tribes in the south and eliminating al Qaeda and ISIL groups that had grown stronger as the Shia rebels gained more power. As the fighting intensified in early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing.

Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to seal the deal. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since. This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This whole nation idea is still looked on with some suspicion by many in the region. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate or modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.

For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Islamic militants in the north. They have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam, or religious leader. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962 with Egyptian aid, which included use of chemical weapons. Fifty years later Yemen became the new headquarters of AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists after 2007. Now there is ISIL and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors. By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen, or control of the lucrative khat drug-growing trade. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerate or even support AQAP and ISIL.

The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations (Iran) or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Shia rebels were from northern Yemen and controlled the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last decade the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles that could hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast.

The rebels also fired more missiles at targets passing Yemen’s Red Sea coast controlled by the rebels. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source for Egypt, bringing in nearly $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make that success possible. At the end of 2023 Iran ordered the Yemen rebels to open fire on shipping in the Red Sea, which moves along the Yemen coast on its way to or from Saudi ports or the Suez Canal. Ships unable to use the canal must take the longer route around the southern tip of Africa. This takes more time and increases costs for the shipping company and their customers.