Gulf

Taiz, Not Mokha, Will Decide Saudi Arabia’s War on the Houthis

Saudi-backed forces have retaken ground on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, but the war will be settled at Taiz and by how long Saudi Arabia can absorb Houthi missiles. Patriot stocks, the economy and the Mecca Pact set the endgame.

Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city, photographed on 18 August 2013, about two years before the Houthi siege began. Saudi Arabia’s war on the Houthis will be decided here, not on the coast at Mokha.Photo: Rod Waddington via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped; crops shared under the same licence)

Silent Dossier Editorial DeskOctober 6, 20269 min read

In this article

Mokha: two armies, one port, two claims

On Monday night, as Saudi-backed Yemeni forces announced that they had retaken the Red Sea port of Mokha, a Houthi security officer recorded a video outside the town’s general hospital. It was 10pm on October 5, he said, and the situation was “under control.” He ended with the movement’s slogan: death to America, death to Israel.

Both sides were in the same town, and both said the same thing: we are here. Yemen’s government and its allies released footage of their troops in Mokha. The Houthis released footage of theirs and dismissed the government’s claims as “fabricated heroics,” Al Jazeera reported. Arab television channels are no better guide. Each tells its own version: one has government troops entering Sanaa, another has the Houthi leadership fleeing to Iran. In war there is no truth on the screen.

So the question is not who holds Mokha tonight. The question is how Saudi Arabia ends this war, and what the endgame Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has written for it depends on. The answer is not on the coast. It lies in Taiz, and in how long Saudi Arabia can keep taking hits.

Key takeaways

The 2022 truce is dead. Saudi Arabia has entered Yemen’s war with its air force, and the government’s advance on the coast near Bab el-Mandeb is real.

The coast can be outflanked or lost again. The decisive battle is Taiz, where government forces must cut the supply lines feeding the Houthi siege of the city.

The endgame is set by numbers: a Patriot interceptor stock that has fallen to roughly 400, a shrinking economy, and how long the Saudi public will tolerate strikes on Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia wins this round unless Taiz falls. If it does, the United States is likely to enter the war, which would delay its confrontation with Iran.

How Saudi Arabia turned the battle on Yemen’s coast

The fighting began with a Houthi offensive. In early September the group swept down Yemen’s western coast, took Mokha and the islands guarding the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and pushed into the hills around Taiz. The Houthis had already declared their truce with Riyadh over in July, and they launched wave after wave of missiles and drones into the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has now torn up what was left of the April 2022 truce and gone to war. Its air force is now striking Houthi positions at scale, roughly 100 Saudi aircraft supported the government’s “Operation Dawn of Yemen” launched on October 5, and the ground forces have moved fast. Government troops have reported taking much of the Dhubab district on the strait, the mountains of Haifan south of Taiz, and Mokha itself. The footage that caught the British press was of Houthi fighters being run over by armoured vehicles as their lines broke.

Two details explain why the advance came now.

First, the troops leading it on the coast are the Giants Brigades, a southern force of mostly Salafi fighters that the United Arab Emirates trained and armed, fighting alongside the Saudi-funded Homeland Shield Forces. Their advance means the Emirati-backed camp has reconciled with Yemen’s internationally recognised government after the bitter rift between them, and that Yemen’s southern front is holding together again.

Second, that reconciliation was made at the top. On September 29, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed in Riyadh, with Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman at the table. The offensive now under way is what that meeting produced.

The cost is already heavy. The World Health Organization counts at least 959 people killed and more than 4,200 wounded in the recent fighting, and the International Organization for Migration says more than 184,000 Yemenis have been displaced since the war resumed, according to Al Jazeera.

Analysis

Why Taiz is the battle that decides the war

Haaretz’s Middle East analyst Zvi Bar’el made the case that readers should look past Bab el-Mandeb and Mokha. The coast can be outflanked. The Houthis can come back to it. The battle that decides the war is Taiz.

Taiz is Yemen’s third-largest city and the hinge between the country’s north and south. The Houthis have besieged it for a decade, and their strategy in the south is built on that siege. In the first days of October they took strategic hilltops near the city and advanced on the last road linking it to Aden on the southern coast, military sources told reporters. Whoever controls Taiz controls the gateway to both halves of Yemen. If the Houthis take it, the road to Aden is open, and a Houthi Aden would be a catastrophe for Yemen and for the Gulf.

That is why the forces now on the coast have one job that matters more than any port: they must cut the supply lines feeding the Houthi units around Taiz, and do it quickly, then destroy the force besieging the city. Retaking Bab el-Mandeb is a gain. Breaking the Houthis at Taiz is victory.

Analysis

The Saudi endgame: Patriot stocks and a shrinking economy

Will Riyadh tell Yemen’s forces to stop at Mokha, after recovering what the Houthis seized in September, or push on to Sanaa and uproot the movement? The numbers answer that.

The first is interceptors. Saudi Arabia fired roughly 2,400 Patriot PAC-3 interceptors in the first five weeks of this year’s war with Iran, leaving it with about 400, according to estimates attributed to Reuters and CSIS. That figure is months old, and the stock is almost certainly lower now. No meaningful resupply is expected before 2028.

The shortage shows in what is being hit. Houthi missiles and drones have reached Riyadh, Jeddah and a refinery there, the port of Yanbu more than once, the East-West pipeline, a pumping station near Medina and then a power station in the holy city. On October 5 the Houthis struck Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport and disrupted flights. Some commenters insist the airport was never touched. The New York Times reported that Riyadh, its airport and Jeddah were hit, and satellite imagery has confirmed damage at Saudi energy sites. Comment sections are not evidence. These are high-value targets, and the Houthis escalate every time they take a heavy blow: first oil facilities, now the capital’s airport, next the power grids that keep Saudi cities lit. Every strike asks the same question: how much of this can Saudi Arabia absorb?

The second number is the economy. Saudi output contracted 4.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the sharpest fall since 2020, and the finance ministry now expects the economy to shrink 3.6 percent this year, AGBI reported. The most dangerous part is where the Houthis are aiming. They are striking the sectors the kingdom built to replace oil: tourism, aviation and trade. Every strike on an airport is a strike on Vision 2030, the crown prince’s plan to move the economy beyond oil.

Those two numbers are why the likeliest ending is a negotiated one. After everything the kingdom has done, Riyadh will open a channel to the Houthis and reach a settlement. It will do so from strength. The government’s position is far better than it was a month ago, and the Houthis are in serious trouble despite their push on Taiz. If Taiz does not fall, the Houthis end this round in a disastrous position: they will have given up much of what they won on the western coast and failed at the siege their whole strategy rests on. That is a loss across the board.

Analysis

The Mecca Pact: Pakistani and Turkish air defences

There is another way to change the numbers, and it was switched on this week. On October 5 the defence and foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye (Turkey) met in Riyadh and, for the first time, invoked the Mecca Alliance for Defence. The pact, signed on August 7, treats an attack on one member as an attack on all. Khalid bin Salman said the ministers agreed to “activate collective deterrence measures,” and the three governments promised to “provide the agreed military forces and capabilities and ensure their rapid deployment” to the kingdom, Al Jazeera reported.

This does not mean Pakistani or Turkish troops will storm Houthi lines in Yemen. It means air defence. Pakistan fields Chinese-made systems, and Türkiye has its own domestically built ones. Their advantage is that they do not depend on the scarce American interceptor stock. If they can protect Saudi skies, bring down the drones and reduce the missiles reaching high-value targets, Saudi Arabia can afford a longer war. And a longer war makes uprooting the Houthis a real option.

It will not happen overnight. The systems arrive with their crews, and moving them takes weeks: one, two, perhaps three. But when they arrive, they will sharply cut the damage the Houthis can do.

They also raise the stakes for the Houthis. Neither Pakistan nor Türkiye wants this war. Pakistan borders Iran and plays mediator; Türkiye is in no position to fight. But their crews will be in the line of fire. If a Houthi strike kills Pakistani or Turkish soldiers, or humiliates them, Islamabad or Ankara will be pushed into the war. The Houthis are no longer firing at Saudi Arabia alone. They will have to choose their targets carefully, and stay away from air-defence sites, or the war turns against them very fast.

Analysis

Saudi Arabia is winning, and America has left it alone

Saudi Arabia has done everything right in this war. It has rebuilt the anti-Houthi front, assembled an alliance that has never existed before, put ground forces in motion and changed the map in Yemen in days. That is something the United States could not do. Donald Trump’s 2025 air campaign against the Houthis burned through more than $1 billion in its first month, came close to losing American jets, and ended in a truce that left the movement in place.

The American role in this war has been cowardly. Washington has turned down Saudi requests to join the fight twice in recent weeks and has offered intelligence and targeting support instead, Axios reported. Saudi Arabia is fighting its war alone, and doing it with courage.

As things stand, Saudi Arabia wins this round. It has shown that it is the only power able to change the picture in Yemen. The one thing that can reverse that is the fall of Taiz.

Analysis

If Taiz falls, the United States enters the war

According to Axios, US officials said Washington could join if the Saudi operation runs into trouble. The trigger is Taiz. If the city comes close to falling, or if the government’s forces fail to cut the Houthi supply lines, the United States will enter the war.

That would be a dangerous turn. US Central Command does not want to be drawn into Yemen. The reason is not whether Trump is hawkish. It is that the military does not want to scatter its forces in a new war while Trump threatens Iran with a crushing blow over its refusal to sign a new agreement and its talk of enriching uranium toward a bomb. An American war in Yemen means a later war with Iran.

The Saudi public will decide how this ends

What viewers are watching on Gulf television is not the decisive scene, and it is not the end. The war is still running. We will know how it ends when Yemen’s forces cut the Houthi supply lines at Taiz. That is the crux.

Whether Saudi Arabia holds does not depend on the crown prince alone. It depends on the Saudi people. In the end every ruler looks to his public. If Saudis are willing to absorb the losses, the kingdom can finish the Houthis for good. If they start to say the danger is too great and the cost too high, Riyadh will negotiate a bad deal.

The government’s forces are advancing. They have taken Bab el-Mandeb, and they are beating the Houthis on the coast. But the main battle is in Taiz, and what happens there will decide whether this is the Houthis’ setback or their end.