By Timour Azhari
RIYADH, July 27 (Reuters) – Yemen’s Houthi Movement aims to replicate Iran’s Hormuz Strait strategy in the Red Sea by disrupting shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb and has been emboldened by an insufficient international response, Yemen’s top diplomat said on Monday.
“The Houthis want to copy the Iranian model and this will shut down two main straits, the gateways into the Gulf and Red Sea,” Yemeni Foreign Minister-designate Afrah Al-Zouba said, speaking to a small group of journalists at the Yemeni embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The Red Sea has become a new front in the Iran war, with the Houthis taking an escalatory approach against Saudi Arabia by firing missiles and drones at the kingdom and declaring a blockade on Saudi shipping.
Saudi Arabia has responded with airstrikes on what it said were Houthi military facilities and said it would protect commercial shipping, accusing the Houthis of serving foreign agendas.
The escalation has also threatened to bring back conflict to Yemen, where war killed hundreds of thousands of people after the Houthis stormed the capital Sanaa in 2014, prompting Saudi Arabia to intervene at the head of an Arab coalition.
A truce was reached in 2022 but it has been pierced by the recent cross-border fire, and Saudi officials, Western diplomats and Yemeni officials see a return to full-scale war as more likely now than at any point since then.
Zouba said Yemen’s government, which enjoys strong Saudi backing, was prepared for an escalation and that firing was taking place along the frontline, spanning the country’s northwest from the Red Sea up to the Saudi border, but neither side had yet mounted an offensive.
“We think that this conflict now needs to come to an end, either via peaceful means, or the other way,” she said.
(Reporting by Timour Azhari in Riyadh; Writing by Yasmine Ghania and Timour Azhari; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Stephen Coates)
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