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October 30, 2026: In Yemen, the drug trade keeps the Houthi rebels going. The drug trade provides the Houthis with billions of dollars to pay for operations that shatter the economy and lives of many Yemenis. They work with international criminal gangs, like the Russian Bratva, to distribute these drugs worldwide, including New York City and other major metropolitan cities. The Yemeni drug traffickers move more than 14 tons of drugs a year, including cocaine, heroin, Captagon pills, hashish, and methamphetamine. Houthi-controlled areas are public drug markets, with all the lethal substances for sale.
Moving the drugs around from the producer is a complex business. Regional distribution relies on dhows, fishing boats, and small vessels that move deadly cargo across the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, often concealing it among legitimate merchandise. Some drugs move overland to other nations in the Arabian Peninsula, including Saudi Arabia (narco-narcotics). The legitimate government in eastern Yemen allows shipments to go by sea to other Arab and African destinations. Some Yemen drugs have been intercepted off South America.
The drug money enables the Houthis to purchase weapons and attract young Yemenis to fight alongside the Houthis and help distribute the drugs. These young fighters, many teenagers, are given Captagon pills that energize them to fight more fiercely. Many of these young fighters become addicted to the pills, giving the Houthis a force of fierce fighting slaves. The drugs are also distributed to young men in areas the Houthis occupied. This destabilizes any organized resistance and provides new recruits.
For over a decade, Yemen has been a troublesome region. The civil war, lack of food and medical care for the civilian population, and seizure of foreign aid personnel by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen continued. This hindered the government, NGO, and international organizations’ efforts to address these problems. At the start of this year, the Houthi militia in Yemen halted their attacks on American commercial ships headed for the Suez Canal. Those attacks resumed after the June 13–14 Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Yemen sits at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, with the Persian Gulf to the northeast, the Red Sea to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the southeast. Ships that don’t go through the Suez Canal must take a much longer route around Africa's southern coast. Many more merchant vessels are making that journey because war-risk insurance through the Red Sea is very expensive, and the area is now an official war zone. On the plus side, the need for so many more ships to make this long journey, instead of taking the shorter route through the Suez Canal, required a 10% increase in the container ship fleet. Fortunately, an eleven percent surplus of these long ships existed, and now nearly all of them are at work.
The Houthis say they are at war with Israel and still fire at ships at random, though they contend they only fire on ships serving Israel. So far, they have attacked over 200 ships, and about 20 percent were damaged. The U.S. Navy sent a carrier task force to launch airstrikes on Houthi targets with predictable minor effects. That led to more frequent and aggressive attacks, which briefly reduced Houthi activity. These attacks used over 200 missiles and as many shells from 127 mm or five-inch guns on destroyers. Several of those 127 mm shells shot down Houthi drones.
In 2024, one of the Houthi drones hit a building in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, killing one civilian and wounding several others. The next day, Israel sent F-15 and F-35 fighter-bombers to destroy several economic targets in the Yemeni Red Sea port of Hudaydah. This is where weapons arrive from Iran for the Houthis to use against Red Sea shipping. The airstrikes destroyed fuel storage sites as well as port facilities, including the difficult-to-replace ship-unloading cranes. If the Israelis leave the port alone, repairs could take up to a year. The Israelis and other nations are not leaving the port of Hudaydah alone if the Houthis are using it.
Yemen’s Shia rebels, led by the Houthi tribe, have used their large stockpile of Iranian missiles to try to block access to the Suez Canal. This capability developed over the last decade as the rebels launched attacks on more distant 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 to fire from northern Yemen across Saudi territory to hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also acquired the reconnaissance capability to accurately fire missiles at ships passing through the narrow, 26-kilometer-wide Bab el-Mandeb strait off southwestern Yemen and force ships to take the longer and more expensive and time-consuming fourteen-day, 6,000-kilometer route around the southern tip of Africa.
These attacks have long threatened ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the Red Sea's northern end. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source of income for Egypt, bringing in about $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 such an interdiction possible.
Western nations reacted slowly to this interdiction effort but, by the end of 2024, were launching regular airstrikes on Houthi targets, coordinating their efforts with the Israelis and U.S. carrier task forces operating in the region. In October 2024, American B-2 bombers dropped penetrating bombs on Houthi underground facilities, destroying missile stockpiles and headquarters for the rebels. This reduced the number of missiles available. This was seen in a lower frequency of attacks. A naval blockade of Yemen was tightened, with more frequent inspections of fishing boats and coastal freighters. Western warships close to the Yemeni shore continue using their defensive weapons to defeat attacks launched from the Yemeni coast. The United States currently has several destroyers based off Yemen's coast.
The Arabian Peninsula is home to several wealthy Arab kingdoms that prosper on vast petroleum reserves beneath the desert sands. The only area with no oil is Yemen's fertile south. Until the Persian Gulf oil industry emerged over a century ago, Yemen was the most prosperous part of Arabia because monsoon rains made it green as they traveled to East Africa. The current head of the Houthi movement is 47-year-old Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. Several of his predecessors were killed by American, Arabian, or European attacks. The loss of so many Houthi leaders has not disrupted the violent activities of the Houthis and, with the aid of Iranian-supplied missiles and drones against shipping in the Red Sea and an occasional missile attack on Israel, shows no sign of slowing. The Israeli missile defense system blocks the Houthi attacks, but the Houthis are satisfied that they can make such attacks. These attacks justify the hundreds of millions of dollars in missiles and other military aid Iran has sent to the Houthis.
Western efforts to disrupt Houthi violence via killing of Houthi leaders have failed. The Houthi clan is large, and there are always rep