Death to the Houthis

A fireball rises from the site of an Israeli air strike in Sanaa, Yemen, on August 24, 2025 [File: Reuters]

You name any country in the Mid-East and I tend to think sand, sand and goat herders living in tents. And then I see pictures of downtown areas filled with big buildings and cars and I am shocked. This has happened many times so you might think I would have gotten used to it, but I haven't. I'm still shocked every time I see an image like this.

Okay, this image has a fireball front and center, but with as many conflicts as we have going on in the world and with everybody and their mother carrying a camera around in their pocket, it's not that unusual. Good shot with the camera, though.

The Israeli air strike was directed at the Houthi leadership.

Sanaa (or Sana'a) is at 7,500 feet of elevation, as is Abha in Saudi Arabia, which is just over 200 miles north of Sanaa.

Sanaa Yemen and Abha Saudi Arabia

Previous posts about Sanaa:

• Suicide Bombers
• Sana'a, Capital of Yemen

Post about Abha: The Red Sea

Houthi Ceasefire

This was a surprise:

Iran-Backed Houthis Reportedly Declare Ceasefire Shortly After Trump Victory by Tyler Durden

Former President Trump isn't even back in the White House, but news of his historic victory in the US presidential election has already sent shockwaves through the top leadership of the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Reports on X indicate that the rebels have declared a ceasefire, halting a year of missile and drone strikes on Western-linked commercial and military vessels across the critical maritime chokepoint in the southern Red Sea.

According to Defense Arabia on X, Houthi spokesman Yahya Sarea stated, "Our operations in international waters were purely defensive, and we announce their final cessation."

I don't know whether this demonstrates clear thinking on the part of the Houthis or just the general flakiness of Arabs. And I'm not sure just what kind of 'clear thinking' led the Houthis to think that Trump would be good for them.

Houthis

Houthi fighters take over a cargo ship (Houthi Movement via Getty Images)

Curious story:

Why the Houthis now rule the Red Sea - America has silently admitted defeat by Malcolm Kyeyune

Excerpt: 

This should probably be huge news: one of the most important trade routes in the world is now blocked by a rag-tag group of militants, and the US Navy has thrown its hands up in defeat and sailed away. And yet, we just don’t want to talk about it.

Basically it sounds like tactics and our hide-bound military has yet to adapt. They are rightfully hidebound I might add, I mean it's tradition to be hide-bound, that is, until you start getting your ass kicked by the new kid on the block. I'm sure they will adapt, eventually, hopefully before the collapse of civilization, but whatever.

Malcolm does make the argument that maybe Europe should be doing the heavy lifting here, after all they are the ones being most impacted by these hijackings. Europe might be able to contribute more to this endeavor if they hadn't been listening to the USA telling them to quit buying cheap gas from Russia.

Note - the ship in the picture is RORO - a ship for transporting automobiles. RORO stands for roll on, roll off, and that big thing sticking up on the right rear of the ship is a ramp that folds down to enable cars to be driven on and off of the ship. My main point being that it is NOT the tanker that was recently attacked.

I'm surprised to see the helicopter in the picture. I thought all these hijackings were being done by guys in speedboats.

Djibouti

Why Every Country Has Military Bases in Djibouti
RealLifeLore

I've been reading Djibouti by Elmore Leonard. It's a novel about a middle aged woman filming a documentary about pirates around the Horn of Africa. I've been working on it for a while, it's not a page turner, but the story is interesting enough that I keep plugging away. I'll probably finish it in the next couple of days.

It seems like there has been a problem with pirates in that area for a long time. Since 2008 pirates have attacked over 200 ships. Now we have the Houthis attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea just north of Djibouti, so I'm a little curious about what's going on over there. We've got Navy ships over there and it seems like squashing the Houthis would be the an easy task for the most powerful Navy in the world, but the attacks seem to just keep getting worse instead of going away. Of course, we have Ukraine occupying our commander-in-chief's attention and everyone knows that keeping those gas pipeline tariff kickbacks coming is more important than any silly commercial shipping business, right?

It took five years for the shipping companies to get their ducks in a row and get enough security personnel to bring the piracy problem under control, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Houthis haven't been squashed yet.

Rocket the Kasbah

Tam has a post up about this morning's air strike by the US Navy on the Houthis, with video.

War Machine

Marib has faced several Houthi offensives, as the group seeks to take the Yemeni government's last major stronghold in northern Yemen [File: Ali Owidha/Reuters]

It looks like the gun was mounted on wheels so that it could be towed by a motorized vehicle. Evidently this guy thought it would be easier to maneuver if the gun was in the bed of his truck. I don't disagree, I hate trailers. They're a big pain in the neck. I am sort of surprised though. That gun probably weighs a ton, a lot more than that truck is designed to carry. That seems to be the standard operating procedure in the third world - load the trucks with two or three or ten times as much as they were designed to carry.

I'm not sure just what kind of gun it is. It looks like it might be a 20 mm antiaircraft gun.

Guns

Thousands of illicit weapons are displayed onboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey.

That's a bunch of guns, easily a million dollars worth, even if you are buying them wholesale.

Wild images show thousands of assault weapons, machine guns and sniper rifles the US Navy says it found on a sailing ship believed to be bringing them from Iran to support the war in Yemen. - New York Post

Presumably the boat that was carrying the weapons

 

USS Monterey

On one hand I'm kind of opposed to restricting rebel's access to weapons. That's what the UN does and it has resulted in several disasters. On the other, sometimes you need to choose what side you're on, and Iran is pretty obviously on the other side. If a proxy war is what you want, a proxy war is what you get.

Via Richard Fernandez

Jizan, Jazan

Houthi forces launch a ballistic missile aimed at Saudi Arabia on March 25, 2018
[Houthi Military Media Unit via Reuters]

Video Shows Saudi Red Sea Oil Terminal Ablaze After Fresh Drone Attack by Tyler Durden

The oil terminal is in Jizan (or Jazan, depending on who's spelling it). An oil terminal in Saudi Arabia, on the Red Sea, near the border with Yemen? That sounds familiar, and sure enough I put up a post about another attack a few months ago. All the videos in the ZeroHedge post are from Twitter, which don't lend themselves to clean embedding, so I went to YouTube to see if they had one. YouTube has bunch of videos of rocket attacks on Jizan. I didn't see any of the latest attack. I don't know if that matters though. The conflict has been going on for a while and will probably continue indefinitely. Another Forever War for your entertainment.

Suicide Bombers

Yemeni policemen stand next to wreckage at the scene of a car bombing outside a police academy in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015. A suicide bomber driving a minibus full of explosives killed tens of people Wednesday morning as cadets gathered near the police academy in the heart of Yemen's capital, Sanaa, security officials and witnesses said. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Every week there's a new report of a suicide bombing somewhere in Central Asia or the Mideast, or both. Distressing, to say the least. I view the perpetrators as crazed, demented individuals, whose departure from the realms of rational thought have relegated them to the status of sub-humans. But that's not exactly true. Jeffery William Lewis has a good article about suicide bombers on Ohio State University's website.
    If you look at it another way, they are simply warriors fighting for a cause. When we (that's the royal we, as in Western Civilization) send our soldiers off to fight a war, we expect that some of them are going to die. That is a price we, as a society, are willing to pay in order to achieve victory over our adversaries. Islamic jihadists are no different.
    Our goals are incompatible, that is, whatever we are trying to achieve is completely different from what the Islamists want to achieve. Actually, our goals are more likely mutually incomprehensible. We don't reject our opponents views because we disagree with them, we reject them because we don't even understand them.
     It's a matter of belief, and that is something you grow up with. We are all part of our own societies. Rejecting our society's values is going to leave us isolated.
    The Mideast and Central Asia are having big problems now because now they have big populations. A hundred years ago nobody lived there. The land was inhospitable, there was no water and certainly no treasure. Then along came Western Civilization and we brought technology and irrigation, plentiful food and anti-biotics and now the Mideast and Central Asia have zillions of people, zillions of people with a 14th Century culture. That culture worked fine when were only 2 or 3 people per square mile, but it's not adapting so well to the new, modern, densely populated areas we have now.
    Left to themselves I am sure they will sort themselves out in a hundred years or so. It is likely to be a hundred years of continuous civil war. Human societies can be notoriously difficult to sort out. A hundred years may seem like a long time, but it took Western Civilization 500 years to make the same cultural advance. All we have to do is resist the urge to send in big, modern, professional armies to try and smite a few cockroaches.

Sana'a, Capital of Yemen

Yemen seems to pop up in the news a lot more often than any two-bit third world hell hole in the back of beyond should have any right to. This time a couple of Belarusian military instructors got shot in the capital city of Sana'a. Hadn't heard of this place before, so I look it up on ye olde Wiki and find this:

Sana'a is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. At an altitude of 7,500 feet, it is also one of the highest capital cities in the world. Sana'a has a population of approximately two million, making it Yemen's largest city.

Denver is a mile high, which is only 5,000 feet, so Sana'a is getting up there. And here I thought the Arabian peninsula was a big, flat stretch of sand. At that altitude is doesn't get all that hot even though it's in the hottest part of the world.