Yemen’s Claim to Have Taken Mocha Is Disputed by Its Own Officials
Yemen’s military says its forces captured Mocha on Monday afternoon with Saudi air support and have “secured” the Bab al-Mandab strait. Government and military sources told Reuters and AFP something narrower: that forces reached only the city’s outskirts, and that what they hold is the Dhubab military airfield and the road to it. The Houthis have not commented on Mocha at all.
The gap between the two accounts is the story, because the strait is the reason any of this matters to a British motorist: with Hormuz effectively shut, Saudi crude has been going out through the Red Sea, and the Houthis took the coast overlooking Bab al-Mandab last month. Dhubab airfield is 45 kilometres south of Mocha, so holding one is not holding the other. Major General Turki al-Malki put a hundred fighter jets behind the push and said the coalition had destroyed 324 “high-value” targets since the offensive began, along with weapons depots and stores of booby-trapped boats and naval mines. Operation Yemen Dawn was announced on Sunday by Rashad al-Alimi, who said every opportunity for de-escalation was “exhausted”. The cost so far, on the government health ministry’s own count, is at least 959 killed and 5,000 injured since 6 August, with 197,000 displaced on United Nations figures. The Houthis say they struck Riyadh’s airport and an Aramco refinery; satellite imagery examined by the BBC shows heavy smoke at the Aramco Riyadh refinery on Saturday and a plume at the Khurais processing facility on Sunday. Their coordination centre has told airlines that Saudi airspace outside Mecca and Medina is no longer safe. António Guterres condemned the cross-border attacks and said he was deeply concerned by the escalation. Watch for independent confirmation of Mocha.