Yemen’s New Offensive Targets the Second Oil Chokepoint

Yemen’s Saudi-backed government announced a nationwide offensive against the Houthis on Sunday, even as the rebels cut the last road into Taiz. Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, ordered every armed formation onto a plan to retake the rest of the country. Brent crude still settled at $102.25 a barrel on Friday.

The speech landed on the same day the Houthis tightened a siege on a government-held city, and on the same weekend OPEC+ left November output caps untouched. The fight that matters for that price is the Red Sea gate the rebels seized last month, not a flag over Sanaa.

Al-Alimi Orders a Nationwide Push Against the Houthis

Al-Alimi spoke on television from the Saudi-backed camp that has run Yemen’s recognised government since the Houthis took Sanaa in 2014 and pushed it to Aden. He said forces would extend “the authority of the state and its institutions over the entire national territory,” and he put state bodies on full alert “until the mission is completed and victory is achieved.”

We have instructed the armed forces, security forces and all military formations to begin carrying out their assigned tasks under an approved plan until the country is liberated from the Houthis.

Rashad al-Alimi, chairman, Presidential Leadership Council, televised address, Oct. 4, 2026

Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili, spokesman for the government army, said those forces had already carried out 257 precision attacks on Saturday against Houthi sites and that initial counts put at least 700 Houthi fighters dead. Those figures come from the army, and they have not been independently confirmed. Early Sunday the Saudi-led coalition said it had run 97 strikes of its own on the Tor al-Baha front and the Taiz axis, using aircraft, drones, artillery, missiles and snipers.

Ibrahim Jalal, a London-based defence analyst, said peace tracks had failed because the power balance had been stuck for years, and that “in order to break the stalemate, there must be a decisive battle.” A 2022 truce collapsed in July. What Aden announced Sunday is the first time in this round that the government has described a single, authorised national campaign rather than another local counterattack.

The Taiz-Aden Road Fell the Same Sunday

The map did not wait for the speech. The Institute for the Study of War said the Houthis captured the main supply road between Taiz and Aden on Oct. 4, part of a push to take Taiz itself, and that its researchers has not yet observed any offensive action from the government side despite the declaration of a countrywide assault.

NEW: The Houthis captured the key supply route between Taiz and Aden cities on October 4, which is part of the Houthi campaign to seize Taiz City.

Other Key Takeaways:

The Yemeni government announced an offensive operation across all fronts against the Houthis, but ISW-CTP has… pic.twitter.com/CtDY7kGgtQ

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) October 4, 2026

That gap is the story on the ground. Riyadh had been signalling a big push for weeks. In September, while that signalling ran, the Houthis walked down the Red Sea coast. In October the same pattern held: Aden declared, and the rebels took the road that feeds Taiz from the interim capital. Hisham Al-Omeisy, a conflict analyst and former UN and embassy official in Yemen, noted that al-Alimi tied the order to National Defense Council decisions and “necessary procedures,” language that presents a state campaign, and that the next few days in al-Bayda, Marib, al-Jawf and the Bab al-Mandab/Taiz theatre would show whether this is a limited bid to recover the strait or a war for the whole country.

The Houthis are also heavier than they were in the last round of this civil war. Foreign troops in a push to pry them out of the highlands would meet a different force, and a colder local reception, than the coalition faced a decade ago.

Why Bab al-Mandeb Now Sets the Oil Price

Oil is still above $100 because the Houthis now sit on Bab al-Mandeb, the southern gate of the Red Sea, which had become the main detour after Iran throttled the Strait of Hormuz. Mocha fell on Sept. 10. By Sept. 11, government sources said the rebels had taken the last coastal towns, reached Dhubab, and landed boats on Mayyun Island, also called Perim, in the middle of the strait.

Bab al-Mandeb is the approach to Saudi terminals at Yanbu and the path Gulf crude uses to reach Europe through Suez without threading Hormuz. Once the rebels hold the coast and the island in the channel, artillery can cover a waterway that narrows to about 20 kilometres. Missiles become optional.

HOW THE RED SEA COAST SLIPPED

1. July 2026: The 2022 truce collapses and fighting between the Houthis and government forces widens again.
2. August 6, 2026: The Houthis open a major campaign against government units on the western coast.
3. September 10, 2026: Houthi fighters take the Red Sea port of Mocha after government forces pull back toward Dhubab.
4. September 11, 2026: Government sources say the group has taken the remaining coast, landed on Perim, and completed a takeover of the Bab al-Mandeb area.
5. October 4, 2026: Al-Alimi declares a nationwide offensive; the same day, the Houthis cut the Taiz-Aden road.

Houthi military spokesman Brigadier-General Yahya Saree said the coastal operation drove Saudi-backed forces from six districts covering 5,400 square kilometres. Hazem al-Assad, a member of the Houthi politburo, told an interviewer that navigation in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb was “safe and orderly.” Ship-tracker counts on the day Mocha fell told a thinner story, with crossings that afternoon running well below the days just before the port changed hands.

Iranian officials treated the advance as a second lever beside Hormuz. Ebrahim Azizi, who chairs Iran’s parliamentary national security commission, praised Yemen for standing “against imperial hegemony.” Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, called Hormuz and “the homegrown resolve of the resistance” a joint vise on the United States and its partners. The second-order oil fact is simple: a bypass only works if both ends of the Arabian Peninsula are passable.

Hormuz Flows Recovered on a Jury-Rigged Route

Tehran still treats the Strait of Hormuz as closed to ordinary commercial traffic. Tankers are moving anyway, under U.S. naval coordination, with transponders off, and with ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman. That is not a normal strait. It is a workaround that costs more time, more hulls and more insurance, and it can reverse in a week of better Iranian shooting.

The International Energy Agency’s September report put total oil exports from Gulf countries in August at about 13 million barrels a day, nearly half the pre-war level. Crude losses had narrowed to just under 45 percent, helped by bypass pipelines and U.S. escorts. Refined products and LPG were still almost 60 percent, or 3.7 million barrels a day, below February. Net diesel and gasoil exports from the Gulf averaged 390,000 barrels a day in August, just over a quarter of the pre-war pace.

Later snapshots looked fuller and then shakier. Kpler, which tracks tankers, put regional crude exports excluding Iran at least 16.5 million barrels a day from Sept. 1 through Sept. 28, close to pre-war rates, while its late-September briefing still had Middle East crude still below pre-war flows once Hormuz clearance was measured against a 17.1 million barrel-a-day baseline. Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, said he had seen a possible pullback of 2 million to 3 million barrels a day in the most recent days as attacks on shuttle tankers picked up, including Kuwaiti very large crude carriers on repeat runs.

Volume coming back is not the same as a supply system you can book six months out. Freight is higher. War-risk premia are higher. Product cargoes, especially diesel, never recovered with the crude. And the Red Sea detour that made the August-to-September rebound possible now has Houthi guns on both the water and the islands.

November Quotas Stay Frozen at September Levels

Seven OPEC+ members, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman, met online on Oct. 4 and decided to keep September production levels for November. They will meet again on Nov. 1. The group finished returning 1.65 million barrels a day of 2023 voluntary cuts in September and is still holding about 2 million barrels a day of older cuts through year-end.

Those ceilings are, for now, a paper exercise. The war has left Gulf members far below the numbers on the sheet, so a freeze does not withhold extra barrels so much as admit that the barrels are not there. UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said the seven “kept their production ceilings unchanged, in line with market expectations,” and that “despite rising flows through the Strait of Hormuz, their output levels remain well below quota.” “Consequently, the oil market remains tight,” he said.

OPEC+ AUGUST OUTPUT VERSUS TARGETS

The IEA’s table is the August ledger, not November’s. It still explains the Sunday decision. Saudi Arabia, the country underwriting al-Alimi’s campaign, was more than four million barrels a day under its implied target last month. A producer in that hole does not raise quotas. It tries to make the barrels it can still load look like barrels a refiner can count on, which is why the Red Sea coast is now an oil file.

Global Oil Stocks Have Lost 507 Million Barrels

Prices have stayed high because the world has been burning its reserves while Gulf supply stays damaged. The IEA said global stocks fell 507 million barrels from February through August, an average draw of 2.8 million barrels a day, and that August alone took 95 million barrels off the pile.

THE INVENTORY DRAW SINCE FEBRUARY

• August drop: Observed stocks fell 95 million barrels, about 3.1 million barrels a day.
• War-to-date: The cumulative draw from February is 507 million barrels, 2.8 million barrels a day.
• Oil on water: Volumes at sea fell 65 million barrels as Middle East tanker traffic came under fresh attack.
• Who drew: Non-OECD stocks fell 52 million barrels, led by China; OECD tanks rose 23 million as commercial builds offset a 19 million barrel drop in government stocks.

World oil supply fell 1.6 million barrels a day in August to 100.1 million, with more than 10 million barrels a day of Gulf output still shut in. The agency now sees 2026 supply at 100.7 million barrels a day, down 5.7 million from the year before, and demand down 2.5 million. Diesel is where the shortage bites hardest. U.S. diesel topped $200 a barrel in early September, 94 percent above pre-war levels, after Gulf diesel exports collapsed and Russian product flows were hit by Ukrainian strikes.

Brent at $102.25 on Friday is below that September diesel panic and still far above the $73 area before the Iran war began in late February. The number is a reliability premium. Extra tanker transits in a dangerous strait do not refill a 507 million barrel hole if the next missile, or the next closed Red Sea lane, takes the barrels back off.

Khurais and Riyadh Are Now on the Same Map

The Houthis answered the new campaign the way they have answered Saudi air power all autumn, by firing at oil plants. Yahya Saree said the group had launched ballistic missiles and drones at two Aramco sites, one in Riyadh and one at Khurais, 150 kilometres north-east of the capital. Riyadh did not immediately confirm damage. Witnesses and photographs of smoke over a plant south of the capital had already circulated after Saturday’s claimed strike.

That target list is the second-order risk inside Aden’s offensive. The East-West pipeline and Yanbu exist to walk Saudi crude around Hormuz. If a Yemen war meant to free Bab al-Mandeb instead draws more missiles onto Riyadh, Khurais, Yanbu and the pipeline, the bypass becomes the casualty of the attempt to save it. Art Berman, a geologist who writes on energy markets, put the same turn in plainer terms: once Houthi strikes reach Saudi energy plants while Riyadh prepares to go back on offense, the fight stops being a raid schedule and becomes a war over Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea.

WHAT THE NEW CAMPAIGN HAS TO RETAKE

• Mocha: The Red Sea port whose fall on Sept. 10 opened the coastal collapse.
• Perim and the Hanish Islands: The rock in the strait and the archipelago to the north that turn a shipping lane into a kill box.
• The Taiz-Aden road: The supply line the Houthis cut on the day of al-Alimi’s speech, tightening the ring on Taiz.
• The western coast: The strip that lets Saudi crude move to Yanbu and on to Suez without Hormuz.

Andreas Krieg of King’s College London has described the anti-Houthi camp as fragmented, with patrons buying loyalties in the south while the Houthis fight as one force with a single aim. A speech from Aden does not fix that. Ground taken in Marib or on the strait in the next few days would. Until then, the market has a government that has declared a war, a rebel movement that still holds the second oil gate, a producer group that will not raise paper quotas, and a crude benchmark that closed Friday at $102.25 because none of those facts is a system you can call normal.