PUBLISHED BY The Washington Post Today's WorldView By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall

PUBLISHED BY The Washington Post

Today's WorldView

By Adam Taylor

with Sammy Westfall

Email Adam TaylorEmail

 

Houthi attacks on shipping threaten global consequences

Armed men stand on the beach as the Galaxy Leader commercial ship, seized by Yemen's Houthis last month, is anchored off the coast of al-Salif, Yemen on Dec. 5. (Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)

Armed men stand on the beach as the Galaxy Leader commercial ship, seized by Yemen's Houthis last month, is anchored off the coast of al-Salif, Yemen on Dec. 5. (Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)

In 2021, it was a stuck ship that caused massive disruption to global trade. The Ever Given, a 1,300-foot cargo ship, had gotten stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal, blocking an estimated $10 billion of cargo every day. Amid a global pandemic already causing huge trade disruption, deliveries of just about everything were delayed and there were major worries that it could lead to a painful surge in prices for consumers.

Almost three years later, there’s another crisis hitting shipping not so far from where the Ever Given got stuck. On Monday, oil giant BP announced it had paused all shipments through the Red Sea after attacks by the Houthi militant group targeting vessels along the route, which leads to and from the Suez Canal.

While it has not yet done so, the disruption being caused by the Houthi attacks has the worrying potential to cause the type of damage that the Suez Canal blockage threatened. In an editorial published Sunday, the Wall Street Journal suggested it was worse, calling it “the most significant threat to global shipping in decades.”

Roughly 10 percent of all oil traded at sea goes through the Red Sea, but shipping firms have begun to move to avoid the route due to the Houthi attacks, instead taking a far longer and costlier journey around Africa. Oil prices rose after BP, the first major oil firm to pause shipping through the Red Sea, announced on Monday its plans to avoid the area. Most of the attacks have taken place in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a slim waterway near the area controlled by the Iran-linked militant group in Yemen.

In 2021, the Ever Given was freed after a week and the impact on consumers was ultimately minor. This time, however, trade is being disrupted not by an accident or error, but by the deliberate actions of an armed group. The result could be a protracted impact on trade or worse.

The Houthis began their attacks in the Red Sea after Israel began to bombard Gaza in response to the massive Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7. that killed 1,200. The attacks targeted ships that were linked to Israel, the Houthis claimed, with spokesman Gen. Yahya Saree writing on social media that ships carrying Israeli flags or operated or owned by Israeli companies would be targeted.

In practice, it has appeared far more haphazard. As Houthis fired missiles and drones at ships transiting the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, many had no apparent Israeli connection. On Nov. 20, the Houthis hijacked a Bahamas-flagged Galaxy Leader and took its 25 crew members hostage. Though the ship was affiliated with an Israeli billionaire, no Israeli citizens were on board.

In statements, the Houthis have said that their attacks are motivated by anger at the “genocidal war” being perpetrated by Israeli forces in Gaza. It’s an unusual international intervention for a group long focused on Yemen and its immediate neighbors. Unlike Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis are not made up of Palestinians, and they do not share a border with Israel like Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

But the Houthis, who seized control of Yemen’s capital in 2014 and sparked a long and bloody civil war, have received military aid from Iran, the most powerful regional rival for Israel. In 2017, Reuters interviewed an unnamed Iranian official who said that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was working out ways to “empower” the Houthis against their Saudi-backed rivals in Yemen.

While the Houthis have largely been focused on national issues, their rhetoric has long singled out Israel as a nation and Jews as a people as figures of hate. Their slogan, adapted from the revolutionary Iranian phrase, emphasizes both: “God is the greatest; Death to America; Death to Israel; Curse the Jews; Victory to Islam.”

The increasing number of attacks by the Houthis has left global powers scrambling. U.S. and British warships sent to the region to protect commercial ships have already shot down Houthi drones, but Washington is pushing allies to do more.

In a Monday statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the formation of a multinational initiative to “jointly address security challenges in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,” dubbing it “an international challenge that demands collective action.” The initiative, titled Operation Prosperity Guardian, will initially include Bahrain, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain.

The situation is made more uncertain by several factors. Since Oct. 7, the Biden administration has been worried about the conflict in Gaza turning into a broader regional conflict. Opening up a front in the Red Sea could be a step toward that.

Most worrying, however, is the uncertainty about what is motivating the Houthis. The group is considered among the most technically able of the foreign militias backed by Iran, with longer-range missiles that appear to be able to target Israel. Yet despite their reliance on Tehran for technology, analysts believe they act with a large degree of independence. Notably, Houthis are minority Zaydi Shiites, marking them as religiously distinct from the mainstream Shiites who make up the majority of people in Iran and Iraq.

The Houthis have concurrently suggested they may be willing to negotiate, with the group telling Reuters on Saturday that it was involved in Oman-mediated talks. The civil war in Yemen has been kept quiet as back-channel talks continue, even though U.N.-brokered cease-fires have expired. For this reason, Saudi Arabia has been hesitant to push it too hard. But the United Arab Emirates, the backer of another party in Yemen, wants a more forceful approach, Bloomberg reported this week, complicating efforts to isolate the Houthis.

Despite their rural origins in Yemen’s northern mountains, the Houthis have shown a surprisingly global understanding of how to attack global trade, hitting at Saudi Arabian oil facilities long before their current moves to disrupt shipping. The Houthis may believe that by attacking global trade in support of Gaza, they can further domestic aims and bring attention to their position in Yemen’s long-overlooked civil war.

But it’s a gamble. With an election coming up in the United States and bloody wars in the Middle East and Europe, threatening further global economic disruption is a very dangerous game. And it will take more than moving one ship to get trade back on track.

1,000 WORDS

An Iceland resident watches the lava flow. (Kristin Elisabet Gunnarsdottir/AFP/Getty Images)

An Iceland resident watches the lava flow. (Kristin Elisabet Gunnarsdottir/AFP/Getty Images)

Houses in the village of Hafnarfjordur are shown as smoke billows from the lava. (Oskar Grimur Kristjansson/AFP/Getty Images)

Houses in the village of Hafnarfjordur are shown as smoke billows from the lava. (Oskar Grimur Kristjansson/AFP/Getty Images)

A volcanic eruption is underway in southwestern Iceland, with magma breaching the surface north of the town of Grindavik. Coast guard authorities and scientists were investigating the lava flow, which had slowed from “hundreds of cubic metres per second” in the first two hours of eruption, the country’s meteorological office said.

TALKING POINTS

• Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope. Then his career collided with church prosecutors, who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption, setting up the Vatican’s trial of the century. On Saturday, Becciu was found guilty of three counts of embezzlement. The first cardinal to be tried by the Vatican’s little-known criminal court, he was sentenced to five years and six months.

• The journalist who broke the story on decomposing babies in Gaza was shot in the thigh and injured. Television journalist Mohammed Balousha said, "I was wearing everything to prove that I was a journalist, but they deliberately targeted me, and now I am struggling to get the treatment necessary to preserve my life.” He had reported the story of how four premature babies died after being left behind at al-Nasr Children’s Hospital when Israel forced the staff to evacuate.

• The Vatican issued formal, definitive permission for Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, as long as those benedictions are kept separate from marriage. The decree amounts to an about-face after decades of discord between the LBGTQ+ community and the Catholic Church, which has long upheld that homosexuals are “disordered” and said any nod to their unions would be tantamount to blessing sin.

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SISI WINS

The image of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi displayed as election results are announced at the International Convention Center in Cairo, on Dec. 18. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)

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CAIRO — President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi coasted to victory in Egypt’s presidential election this month, clinching a third term in a vote whose outcome was predetermined but which was hailed by supporters as a clear mandate for six more years of iron-fisted rule, even as the country contends with a collapsing economy and a war raging next door.

Sisi, a strongman and former general who rose to power after a coup in 2013, received nearly 90 percent of the vote, election officials announced at a news conference Monday. The handful of little-known candidates who ran against him — none of whom posed a credible challenge — received about 10 percent of the vote among them.

At just under 67 percent, according to the National Election Authority, turnout was higher than in 2014 and 2018. Ahmed Bendari, the body’s director, called it “unprecedented” in Egyptian history.

Sisi has already served two four-year terms; a constitutional amendment in 2019 paved the way for him to stay in office until 2030, but he is presiding over a country that is deeply in debt, flailing economically and living next door to brutal conflict with no easy end in sight.

Sisi’s only serious opponent, former parliamentarian Ahmed Tantawy, was unable to get on the ballot after supporters were blocked from endorsing him. Tantawy’s family members and campaign staff were arrested or harassed and he was indicted last month on charges rights groups described as politically motivated.

Egyptian media, almost entirely state-affiliated, touted Sisi’s accomplishments while giving little airtime to his three challengers. Most voters interviewed across the Egyptian capital during the three-day voting period last week had never heard of the other candidates.

For Sisi and his backers, it was all about the show.

Billboards bearing his face alongside the slogans “All of us are with you” and “Beloved of the Egyptians” loomed above Cairo’s maze of highways ahead of the vote. His campaign banners lined most major streets.

At a polling site in Sayeda Zeinab, a working-class neighborhood in central Cairo, volunteers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the president’s face corralled voters into a line. Near Tahrir Square, the center of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution, young men and women marched down a wide avenue behind “Sisi for president” banners.

Many Egyptians outside polling sites last week described voting as a civic duty.

“I have to give my opinion,” said Rasha Ashour, 40, a nutrition technician from the working-class neighborhood of Basateen. “We want the country to be better, so we are trying to support it to be better.” That meant voting for Sisi, she said. – Claire Parker

Read more: Getting reelected was the easy part for Sisi. But Egypt is on the brink.

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