Fighting between the Houthi militia and Yemen’s internationally recognized government escalated further this week as the Iran-backed group seized territory and exchanged missile and drone attacks with Saudi Arabia.
On Thursday, the Houthis seized the port city of Mokha and by Friday had taken control of the town of Dhubab and the island of Perim, Yemeni government sources told the news agency Reuters. Mokha, Dhubab and Perim had been held by forces aligned with Yemen’s government. All three are strategically located near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
With Iran having blockaded the nearby Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait has become increasingly important as an alternative route for Saudi oil exports. As the Houthis are aligned with Iran, control of and potential attacks on shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait gives Iran additional leverage in its war with the United States.
The government-aligned National Resistance Forces announced on Thursday that troops were reorganizing and consolidating their defenses in Mokha in coordination with other anti-Houthi forces.
The conflict has also spilled into Saudi Arabia, a close US ally and regional rival of Iran’s. This week, the Houthis launched dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at four cities in Saudi Arabia. The Houthis said Saudi Arabia responded with dozens of airstrikes across four Yemeni provinces.
“This is actually a full-scale war,” Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen researcher at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told DW. “It hasn’t been given that name yet but we are marching there full time,” Al-Muslimi said.
Houthis ‘much stronger’
The latest escalation, which started in July, ended a period of relative calm after years of war. A Saudi-led coalition intervened to support Yemen’s government in 2015 following the 2014 Houthi insurgency. The war between the Houthis — which the United States redesignated as a foreign terrorist organization in March 2025 — and the Saudi-backed government ended in 2022 with a UN-brokered truce. However, the country remains de facto split.
The Houthis control Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and most of the country’s north, as well as parts of the center, and now also much of the western coastal stretch, including Mokha, Dhubab and Perim. The internationally recognized government, represented by the Presidential Leadership Council, is based in Aden. Many senior officials operate from Saudi Arabia. Government-aligned forces control parts of the south and east, while tribal groups retain significant influence in parts of the east.
The political landscape was further fragmented in December, when secessionists backed by the Southern Transitional Council (STC), backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), seized areas in the south and east. The fallout between Saudi Arabia, which aims to keep Yemen united, and the UAE-backed secessionists ended with the termination of Yemen’s joint defense pact with the UAE and the withdrawal of Emirati forces from the country. The STC was dissolved in January.
Elham Manea, the director of the Middle Eastern and Gulf Studies Research Competence Area at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich, told DW that the current situation is very different from that of 2015. “The Houthi movement is militarily and institutionally much stronger,” Manea said, “while the camp opposing it, that is, the internationally recognized government, remains more fragmented.”
What’s Pakistan’s role?
Manea said Saudi Arabia had changed its approach. In 2015, Riyadh joined the war in support of Yemen’s ousted government. “Now, it is providing greater military, technical and logistical support to the internationally recognized government and forces aligned with it,” Manea said.
The key question is whether Saudi Arabia is preparing for a war aimed at defeating the Houthi group or seeking to change the military balance, restore deterrence and eventually negotiate from a stronger position.
“At present, I consider the second scenario more likely,” Manea said.
Al-Muslimi offered a similar view: “The Saudis would like to avoid war at any cost.”
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, recently signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, has not yet been invoked. Reuters reported on Thursday that Pakistani officials said no military response under the agreement was currently being discussed, but the government would act when the time came.
Alice Gower, director of geopolitics and security at the London-based political consultancy Azure Strategy, told DW that she doubts Pakistan would join the conflict directly. “But the escalation in Yemen will increasingly test its ability to stay out,” Gower said. “Islamabad does not want to antagonize neighboring Iran,” she added, “and will try to preserve its role as a mediator, while meeting its growing security commitments to Saudi Arabia through intelligence, advice and other forms of military support short of direct participation.”
Humanitarian toll rises
Hans Grundberg, the UN envoy to Yemen, said the country was facing the “harsh reality” of a return to war.
The UN Development Programme estimated that 377,000 people had died as a result of Yemen’s conflict between 2014 and late 2021. Of these, approximately 154,000 deaths were directly caused by combat and violence.
The current conflict has already killed nearly 200 people, according to the World Health Organization. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) also warnedthat around 18,500 people have been displaced. “Families are arriving with nothing: no shelter, no food, no way to know if it’s safe to go back,” Abdusattor Esoev, IOM Yemen’s chief of mission, said in a statement. “Many of these are people who have already been displaced once, twice, even four times before,” he said. “Every time fighting flares up, they lose whatever little they had managed to rebuild.”
This view is echoed by Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch. “When you have a country in which nearly two-thirds of people are in need of aid, any additional precarity and displacement will have a real civilian cost,” she said.
“Thousands of civilians were killed in the fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis between 2014 and 2022, and warring parties repeatedly demonstrated extreme disregard for civilian life,” she said. “The renewed fighting now threatens to repeat the devastating civilian casualty events of the earlier years of the war,” she added.
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Edited by: M. Gagnon
