TEHRAN - In a commentary published on its website, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that victories by Yemen’s Ansarallah forces against Saudi-backed forces have brought them within 80 miles of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which houses the United States’ only permanent and largest military base on the African continent.

The article, written by Andrew Leber, a nonresident scholar in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, and Lesley Anne Warner, a visiting scholar with the Endowment’s Africa Program, argues that the fallout from Ansarallah’s advance could extend beyond Saudi Arabia.

Testifying before Congress last year, General Michael Langley, then the commander of U.S. Africa Command, warned that Ansarallah already possessed the capacity to strike the base facilities, should they decide to escalate attacks against the United States or its interests.

The article adds that military interventions by both the Biden and Trump administrations against Ansarallah forces ended in “strategic defeats”.

The following is a slightly edited version of the article:

Earlier this month, Ansarallah, an armed political movement that has controlled much of Yemen’s territory for more than a decade, took control over Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. Their rapid capture of the Port of Mokha marked the group’s first major military advance in nearly five years. It also further threatened global oil trade at a time when the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz (by Iran in response to the U.S.-Israeli war of aggression) has spiked energy prices worldwide.

Ansarallah initially stayed out of direct involvement in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Still, their advance into Mokha reflects a steady escalation between Saudi Arabia and Ansarallah since mid-July, after the collapse of an initial U.S.-Iranian memorandum of understanding. On September 19, Ansarallah bombed a fuel depot at the main airport in Riyadh, sending a plume of black smoke over the Saudi capital.

This development reflects both the dynamics of a no-longer-frozen domestic Yemeni conflict and continued fallout from the U.S.-Iranian military and diplomatic stalemate in the Persian Gulf. It has also raised the possibility of additional U.S. intervention in the region against Ansarallah, though President Donald Trump has thus far declined to use force against the group.

Ansarallah’s advance gives them control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a crucial chokepoint at the southern end of the Red Sea. It also raises the possibility of opening a second front in the current Persian Gulf conflict—one that could target Saudi oil facilities and threaten an additional Red Sea chokepoint for global energy trade and other goods shipments. Past attacks on Red Sea traffic have already curtailed shipping through the strait while raising insurance and security costs on the remaining vessels.

Previous air campaigns by Saudi Arabia (with the support of other countries) sought to dislodge Ansarallah. However, these efforts contributed to a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and entrenched the Saudi-backed Yemeni forces in a fraught stalemate with Ansarallah. Later military interventions by both the Biden and Trump administrations against Ansarallah forces likewise ended in strategic defeats.

The latest advance also calls Saudi Arabia’s bluff that it could contain Ansarallah on its own, through a combination of quiet diplomacy and the unification of fragmented forces.

In the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Ansarallah now controls the island of Perim (also known as Mayyun), which allows them to harass and disrupt maritime traffic. The advance also brings Ansarallah within 80 miles of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which houses Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa and is the United States’ only permanent military facility on the continent. 
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the resulting impact on maritime insecurity in the Red Sea, Djibouti has reportedly not allowed the United States to use its base for offensive operations against Ansarallah. The country has continued to play a balancing act between its criticism of Israel’s approach in Gaza and its utility as a relatively secure, geostrategic country that houses several foreign military bases.

When testifying before Congress last year, General Michael Langley, then the commander of U.S. Africa Command, warned that Ansarallah already possessed the capacity to strike the base facilities, should they decide to escalate attacks against the United States or U.S. interests. 

How does this affect Saudi Arabia’s energy shipping?

Ansarallah’s control of Red Sea shipping corridors (at least the southern end) compounds a disastrous period for Saudi energy shipments. Around the same time as the Bab al-Mandeb takeover, the kingdom’s crucial East-West Pipeline was severely damaged. That energy corridor, combined with Red Sea ports in Jeddah and Yanbu, had allowed Saudi Arabia to offset a significant portion of the U.S.-Iran war’s direct economic costs.

The one-two punch of pipeline attacks and Red Sea seizures, however, risks forcing Saudi Arabia into relying more on fraught “dark crossings” of the Strait of Hormuz—or face a dramatic drop in oil revenues. Tellingly, the kingdom has already begun canceling key oil shipments to Europe.

Ansarallah’s gains further complicate efforts by the Arab Persian Gulf states to establish a common position for negotiating with Iran on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. 

There’s also a Somaliland dimension to this that doesn’t get much attention outside specialist circles. 

Following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, and continuing during the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran this year, Ansarallah has targeted Saudi commercial vessels in the Red Sea—including more recently near the 18-mile-wide Bab al-Mandeb that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. The Bab al-Mandeb is a maritime chokepoint through which roughly 12 percent of seaborne-traded oil travels, and the uptick in threats has forced many vessels to reroute around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. This has increased the strategic value of Somaliland, that declared independence from Somalia in 1991, and has added to the view in some Washington-based foreign policy circles that the United States should recognize Somaliland’s independence.

The Mogadishu-based federal government has never recognized Somaliland, treating it as an autonomous region. Tensions between Somaliland’s capital, Hargeisa, and Mogadishu escalated in 2024, when Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, granting landlocked Ethiopia a fifty-year lease on approximately 20 kilometers of Somaliland’s coastline for a naval base and commercial port access, with the prospect that the former would extend formal diplomatic recognition to the latter in return. The memorandum provoked fierce opposition from Mogadishu, which accused Addis Ababa of violating its territorial integrity. In December 2024, Turkey brokered the Ankara Declaration between Ethiopia and Somalia, which committed both parties to respect each other’s territorial integrity and work toward “mutually advantageous” commercial arrangements for Ethiopian port access.

In defense policy circles, increased U.S. military engagement in Somaliland could be perceived as a hedge for the U.S. military presence in Djibouti, where President Ismail Omar Guelleh has been in power for almost three decades and is approaching his eighties. In addition, with the establishment of China’s first overseas military installation in Djibouti in 2017, Djibouti is the only place on the planet that has a permanent military presence from both the United States and China. 

Until Israel’s unilateral recognition of the region as an independent state in December 2025, no country had ever recognized Somaliland. There has been speculation as to whether the United States would follow suit, due to Trump’s close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his frequent disparagement of people of Somali descent as well as Somalia as a whole. In addition, Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi (also known as Irro) was in Washington recently, making the case for Somaliland recognition. As yet, there are no public indications that the executive branch has changed U.S. policy on recognition of Somaliland as an independent country.

It remains to be seen if Ansarallah forces can consolidate their hold on port cities such as Mokha and Dhubab, as well as the Red Sea island of Perim.

It also remains to be seen to see whether domestic pressure mounts on Saudi de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman to “do something” about the security dilemma facing the kingdom, as happened in the run-up to Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen last winter. Currently, Saudi commentators are more focused on exhorting the international community to take action.

So far, Trump has demurred, with U.S. diplomats reaching out to Ansarallah counterparts mainly to ensure that the conflict does not directly implicate the United States. Saudi Arabia has reportedly reached out to China instead to try to restrain Ansarallah forces via Iran.

From the U.S.-Africa policy perspective, it remains to be seen whether the worsening of the security environment in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa provides additional justification for increased U.S. engagement. In fact, non-recognition of Somaliland has not inhibited high-level U.S. engagement with the region. A recent State Department report to Congress noted that the U.S. military “has regular engagements with Somaliland authorities and is exploring areas for potential cooperation.”

The United States has also been exploring a closer relationship with Eritrea, which sits north of Somaliland and Djibouti along the Red Sea. Last week, Washington allowed sanctions to expire on members of the ruling party and security forces tied to Eritrea’s conduct during the 2020–2022 conflict in northern Ethiopia, when it was on the side of the Ethiopian government. Given anticipation of renewed conflict in northern Ethiopia (and that Ethiopia and Eritrea have again fallen out and would be on opposite sides of the conflict), overlaid on rising insecurity in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb, I would not be surprised if these developments provide additional justification for U.S. engagement with Eritrea—notwithstanding the country’s human rights record.

The impact on maritime security, given the slight uptick in Somali piracy, which peaked over a decade ago also needed to be watched. Back then, a combination of industry-led measures and multinational naval patrols addressed the threat, but there are a few new variables this time around. One is that international order is more contested, meaning less coherence around military and nonmilitary means of addressing the evolving threats in the Bab al-Mandeb. The second is that the cross-strait relationships are now more evolved and strategic. The third is that the battlespace has evolved: Al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia already use drones for reconnaissance, and the latter group conducted its first confirmed drone strikes in January 2025. Given trends in commercial off-the-shelf drone technologies in the Sahel and West Africa, an expansion in use cases for these technologies seems likely.

Higher insurance costs for the shipping industry as a result of insecurity and higher freight costs associated with any need to reroute from the Bab al-Mandeb around the Cape of Good Hope is anticipated. These costs will inevitably be passed on to consumers. In particular, African economies have already weathered a succession of geopolitical shocks in recent years, with little time in between to increase their resilience, and they will have to brace for higher commodity costs.