Why Perim Island Matters As Houthis Push To Capture Yemen’s Mocha Port

Perim Island, a small Yemeni outpost in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, is emerging as a new front in the widening Iran war as Houthi forces advance towards the nearby port of Mocha, raising the prospect of further disruption to shipping through a vital Red Sea gateway.

The barren island, also known as Mayyun, sits at the narrowest point of the Bab al-Mandab, where the Horn of Africa is only about 12 miles from the Arabian Peninsula. Its location has made it important to empires and regional powers for centuries, but its significance has grown as the Strait of Hormuz has effectively been shut by US President Donald Trump's war with Iran.

Saudi Arabia has diverted its oil exports from Hormuz to the Red Sea in an effort to keep energy supplies moving and limit pressure on prices. That has made the Bab al-Mandab a crucial alternative route for energy shipments.

According to CNN, the Iran-backed Houthis have launched an offensive that could put Perim at risk of falling under their control. Regional sources told CNN on Thursday that Houthi forces were making a major push to capture Mocha, a crucial coastal location around 50 miles north of Perim.

Control of Perim could give the Houthis the ability to prevent ships from passing through the narrow gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. If the route were disrupted further, it could put additional pressure on oil supplies and prices and potentially affect Republican prospects in the United States ahead of the November midterm elections.

Perim’s importance stretches back centuries

The island's strategic value predates Yemen's current conflict.

Perim's location has attracted empires and regional powers for generations. It was once used as a coaling station by ships of the British Empire travelling towards India, and ruins from that period remain scattered across the island.

On a recent visit, a Yemeni honour guard stood in the scorching sun as an ageing gunboat approached. A weathered Yemeni officer helped those arriving onto Perim from the vessel.

A CNN crew had been granted exclusive access to the island.

The landscape is dominated by sand and rock, giving the isolated outpost the appearance of a place largely untouched by time. Yet its position has placed it at the centre of a conflict that now extends far beyond Yemen.

A veteran officer from a brigade loyal to Yemen's internationally recognised government drove an ageing army truck towards the island's highest point. With one hand on the wheel, he pointed towards Eritrea and Djibouti across the water, on the African side of the strait.

The officer said his mission to defend Perim now carries far greater stakes than before.

Yemen’s war becomes part of a wider confrontation

For more than a decade, Yemen's civil war was largely treated as a separate regional conflict. The latest fighting has changed that as the Iran-backed Houthis move towards the Red Sea coast and the confrontation between Washington and Tehran expands.

The Houthis control Yemen's capital, Sanaa, large parts of the country's north-west and much of its Red Sea coastline north of Perim. The internationally recognised government and allied factions hold much of the south and east.

Tarik Saleh, a vice president in Yemen's internationally recognised government, said the country's warnings about Iranian involvement had long been ignored.

“We told the world that this is an Iranian project, but no one listened to Yemenis back then… It’s geopolitical now,” Tarik Saleh told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Saleh is the nephew of ousted Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and a former ally of the Houthis. He is a military commander who remains inside the country while many other members of Yemen's political class have fled.

Saleh said he had survived several assassination attempts and claimed that Iran wanted him dead. Meetings with him are arranged at short notice, in random locations and kept brief because of security concerns.

Speaking to CNN from a tent on a remote Yemeni beach in late August, Saleh said the United States was providing no assistance beyond what he described as “only talk”.

He warned that a Houthi takeover of Perim would make removing the group from the Bab al-Mandab considerably more difficult.

“then a massive (international) force and the navies will be needed” to dislodge them, Saleh said.

From civil war to regional conflict

Yemen's civil war began in 2014, when Houthi rebels seized Sanaa and drove the internationally recognised government into exile. Saudi Arabia led a military campaign the following year to try to dislodge the rebels.

Iran has supplied the Houthis with weapons and training and exercises influence over the group's decisions.

The result is a divided country, with the Houthis controlling the capital and north-west, while government forces and allied factions hold large parts of the south and east.

The humanitarian consequences remain severe, with around 22 million people — roughly half of Yemen's population — requiring humanitarian assistance.

The Houthis entered the wider regional conflict after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. They launched attacks towards Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and began targeting shipping in the Red Sea.

The United States and Israel responded with airstrikes against Houthi targets, destroying key assets. The Trump administration designated the Houthis as a terrorist group in 2025.

The latest Houthi offensive against Yemen's government began in July. It broke a tacit four-year truce between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia and drew Yemen's conflict further into the wider confrontation involving Iran.

An Iranian flight marks a turning point

A rare decision by Saudi Arabia to allow an Iranian passenger plane to land in Sanaa was followed by a series of events that further damaged the informal truce.

Saudi Arabia has imposed restrictions over Yemeni airspace since intervening in the conflict in 2015. It nevertheless allowed an Iranian passenger plane to land in Sanaa in an unusual exception.

The flight was the first direct air link between Tehran and Sanaa in around a decade. It carried a Houthi delegation to the funeral of Ali Khamenei, Iran's former supreme leader. Khamenei was killed alongside several members of his family in the opening US-Israeli strikes of February 28.

When the aircraft returned 10 days later, Saudi Arabia refused to allow it to land in Sanaa.

Saudi authorities were concerned that the aircraft was also carrying Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel and military equipment. Saudi aircraft then struck the airport's runway, forcing the plane to divert to Hodeidah, the Houthi-controlled Yemeni port city.

The episode became a turning point, unraveling diplomacy that had largely preserved the informal truce and halted Houthi attacks on Saudi territory.

Against the backdrop of the collapsing US-Iran ceasefire, the Houthis retaliated by declaring a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia and threatening ships carrying Saudi exports through Bab al-Mandab.

They also launched missiles and drones at Saudi oil infrastructure, airports and other civilian sites.

Houthis have their own interests

The timing of the Houthi offensive could also benefit Iran by increasing pressure on Trump.

Mohammed Al-Basha, a former Yemeni government press officer and Washington, DC-based risk analyst, described the relationship between Tehran and the Houthis as “not a submissive relationship – but they are in bed together.”

Analysts have nevertheless cautioned against presenting the Houthis' intervention as simply an extension of Iran's regional agenda.

Farea Al-Muslimi, a Chatham House research fellow, said the Houthis had their own reasons for returning to war, including domestic problems and a desire to force Saudi Arabia back into negotiations.

“The Houthis needed a war as diversion from domestic problems. They wanted to say they can fight Saudi Arabia into negotiating with them again. And of course, if it is going to help an old friend, like Iran, which at one point was the only friend they had, then why not?” Al-Muslimi said.

He said the Houthis' attacks on Israel, the weakening of other Iranian allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria had increased the Yemeni group's standing within the so-called axis of resistance.

Sanaa officials did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

Houthi leaders have previously maintained that their current offensive inside and outside Yemen is a response to “Saudi aggression and blockade”.

In a statement on Thursday, Nasr al-Din Amer, head of the Houthi-run state news agency Saba, told CNN that the military campaign was intended to “break the siege unjustly imposed by the Saudi enemy for 12 years.”

Amer claimed the Houthis controlled the Bab al-Mandab Strait and parts of the Red Sea through firepower. He said their operations were limited to Saudi vessels.

“We also target the troops mobilized by the Saudis for a territorial advance against us and the weapons the Saudis send to them,” he said.

Shipping through Bab al-Mandab has already declined

The impact on maritime traffic is already visible.

Three years ago, about 10% of the world's seaborne oil trade passed through the Bab al-Mandab. Kpler data indicates that the volume has since fallen by half.

A sustained Houthi campaign could reduce traffic through the route further, particularly as Saudi Arabia relies more heavily on the Red Sea for oil exports following the disruption around Hormuz.

The conflict has also hit Yemen's fishermen.

Yemeni government officials said dozens of fishermen were evacuated from an island north of Perim after a Houthi drone attack killed and injured several people.

Near a makeshift shoreside market, fishermen recently struggled to bring their catches ashore in flimsy fibreglass boats. Several stopped to speak with CNN about the impact of the conflict on their livelihoods.

One trader said that on normal days there would be many ships offshore, but added, “because of the attack of the Houthi there are no ships right now.”

Children played in the lukewarm waters of the Red Sea. Apparently unconcerned about their parents' worries, they jostled to get into the visiting journalists' pictures.

The scenes offered a glimpse of a war-weary, fragile and poor country being pushed closer to a breaking point.

Mocha becomes a major target

Further north, the consequences of the fighting are visible at Mocha, the most northerly government-held city of significance on Yemen's Red Sea coast.

The port has been hit repeatedly by Houthi attacks.

A few weeks ago, more than 25 Houthi rockets struck the sprawling harbour while commercial ships were unloading, according to port director Abdel Malek Al-Sharaabi.

Sixteen people were killed and 22 injured in the attack, Al-Sharaabi told CNN. Six commercial ships were sunk and 14,000 motorcycles were lost.

The damage remains visible across the port. Half-sunk ships sit at unusual angles in the water, while concrete structures on land are marked by holes deep enough to hide a large dog.

Scorched motorcycle frames and piles of semi-melted engines are also scattered around the port.

Al-Sharaabi said the attack was intended to damage the local economy and prevent the port from continuing its commercial role.

“The port had a big role in development and commerce,” Al-Sharaabi said. “This attack aims at hurting this development and stopping services.”

The Houthis have also demonstrated an ability to strike targets far beyond Yemen. Over the past year, they have repeatedly launched attacks against targets in Israel, more than 1,000 miles away.

The group claims to possess hypersonic missiles. Its arsenal also includes long-range, sea-skimming anti-ship missiles designed to evade radar.

The Houthis also possess surface-to-air missiles capable of bringing down high-altitude US drones and threatening crewed aircraft.

Weapons supply raises concern

On Yemen's front lines, government and Houthi forces are fighting with increasingly advanced equipment.

Government troops are using new first-person-view, or FPV, quadcopter drones to attack concealed Houthi bunkers.

“Our troops have improved due to training and new resources like drones,” Saleh told CNN.

Government officials say Iran is providing the Houthis with weapons and equipment capable of threatening tanker traffic in the Red Sea.

CNN was taken in a vehicle with blacked-out windows to a heavily guarded warehouse at an undisclosed location. There, Abdel Nasser El Mamlouh, director of Saleh's military media operation, displayed what he described as an Iranian-made weapons shipment captured before smugglers could deliver it to the Houthis.

The cache included 18-foot-long missiles, complex long-range radar systems, drone engines and optical equipment.

Bullets had also been hidden inside a truck battery.

El Mamlouh said the material had been disguised as commercial equipment to evade detection.

He acknowledged that the shipment represented only a fraction of what is believed to have reached the Houthis.

Smugglers, he said, had confessed to moving 11 shipments similar in size and content before this one, amounting to 750 tons.

If the Houthis seized Perim and gained a foothold in the Bab al-Mandab, government officials warned they would no longer need long-range weapons to threaten shipping.

“They would mine the strait, just like (Iran) did in Hormuz,” he said.

Perim’s stakes extend beyond Yemen

Even reaching Perim offered a glimpse of the dangers of an often one-sidedly high-tech war.

As the CNN team prepared to make the two-mile crossing from the mainland, warnings of an imminent Houthi drone attack forced the gunboat carrying the crew to turn back.

The crew prepared for a possible attack, while the gunner fired a heavy-calibre round from the vessel's rusting weapon.

The incident came as Yemen's civil war increasingly became another potential front line in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran.

Along the government-held stretch of Yemen's Red Sea coast, officials increasingly view the fighting as part of a conflict with consequences for the wider Arab region and international trade.

“(We are) fighting this war on behalf of the Arab world and the international community,” Mamlouh said.

Saleh has warned that removing the Houthis would become more difficult if they seized Perim and gained control of the Bab al-Mandab.

Before hurrying away from his tent on the beach, Saleh was asked what would happen if US support never came.

“We will pay a higher price in the future,” to dislodge the Houthis, he replied.

He warned that the consequences would also be felt by “the American army, the international community and international trade.”