Today, Explained - Pirates of the Red Sea

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

The Houthis, a rebel group from Yemen, are seizing cargo ships in retaliation for the war in Gaza. Vox’s Joshua Keating explains how the pirates are expanding the Israel-Hamas war into the Red Sea ��� and your wallet. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The second Hamas attacked Israeli civilians and started a war back in October, everyone feared it would spill out into a broader regional conflict. People were thinking about the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, you know, land. But one of the most conspicuous spinoffs of this war has been on water. Missile attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea used to be unthinkable. Since November, Houthi fighters have carried out more than 20 of them. A rebel group from Yemen has been attacking ships in the Red Sea for months now. We will continue to prevent all vessels, regardless of their nationalities, headed to the Israeli seaports until the necessary food and medical supplies are delivered to our brothers in the Gaza Strip. And the United States has been blowing up boats in return. We're going to try

and figure out what the Houthis want and whether they'll get it on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Sean Ramos from joined by Joshua Keating, making his Today Explained debut. Joshua writes about the world for Vox, and he's here to tell us about this group from Yemen threatening global commerce, the Houthis. rebel group that controls a large swath of Yemen have been launching attacks on container shipping through the Red Sea. Pretty quickly after the October 7th attacks, the Houthis declared their solidarity with Palestinians fighting Israel and actually launched some long-range missiles at Israel, which were intercepted either by Israeli air defenses or by the U.S. military in the region. Yemen's Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a series of drones and missiles launched towards Israel's coastal holiday city of Eilat.

Israel reported destroying an aerial target over the Red Sea. They've since shifted tactics to sort of targeting the shipping through this area. Houthi leader Mohamed Al-Houthi sitting down for a rare interview, telling ABC News that the group will escalate strikes on any ship linked to Israel. Countries that attack us will be a legitimate target for us, such as the ships belonging to the usurping entity or heading to it. A lot of the ships they've attacked actually have no connection to Israel or very little connection to Israel.

But at this point, there have been about 25 attacks by the Houthis against merchant vessels traveling through the Red Sea. And it's caused a great deal of chaos in the global shipping industry. The one that kind of kicked this whole thing off was in late November when the Houthi rebels on helicopters basically seized the galaxy leader, an Israeli-linked cargo ship, and took it to Yemen, where it's still being held. Its fighters appeared to land by helicopter onto the top deck. They brandished weapons at the ship's crew and ordered them to lie down.

Basically, they are being held essentially as hostages with pretty limited communication with the outside world. And, you know, the way the shipping industry works, these ships are, they could be owned by Maersk, a Danish company, but, you know, flagged in Malta or Liberia. In the case of the Galaxy Leader, most of the crew came from the Philippines. So there are massive numbers of countries sort of involved in just one of these ships. But most of the attacks haven't been like that.

There have been a few different types. They've tried a few different methods. The latest target of Yemen's Houthis, Norwegian tanker Strinda. Struck by a missile, its crew is unharmed. Its owner says it traveled from Malaysia heading to Italy with a shipment of palm oil. There was an attack in recent days using a sort of basically an uncrewed boat that exploded. And one that, you know, a lot of defense experts I talked to that really caught their eye is the Houthis have been firing ballistic missiles at ships.

So a ballistic missile as opposed to a cruise missile is one that goes a lot higher and a lot faster, basically, and is a lot more difficult to intercept. And, you know, this may have been the first ever use of an anti-ship ballistic missile anywhere in the world. So are the Houthis trying to steal cargo here like proper pirates, or are they just in it to be disruptors? They're in it for the disruption. I mean, basically, they want to target both shipping that's sort of directly linked to Israel or linked to countries that are supporting Israel in its war in Gaza. So, this is a way that they've found to kind of globalize the conflict,

impose costs on the international community for the actions Israel is taking in Gaza. And I think you can sort of see this in the context of a wider set of actions by Iran-backed groups in the Middle East. And so, you know, we've seen that with Hezbollah launching rockets into northern Israel. We've seen that with these militias attacking U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which the U.S. has begun retaliating against. And so I think the Houthi attacks you can see as part of that. Who is this group that's attacking these ships, that's hijacking these ships?

Who are the Houthis? What's their origin story? So the official name of the group is Ansar Allah. They're usually called the Houthis. They're named after their founder, Hussein al-Houthi, and his family, which is still kind of in a leadership role. They're Zaidis, which is a minority Shia Muslim sect. They are based primarily in northern Yemen. And they first kind of came on the scene as a rebel group in the 1990s, fighting against Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was the sort of longtime dictator of Yemen.

I ask for forgiveness from all my people, men and women, for any shortcomings during my 33-year-long rule. Saleh was overthrown amid Arab Spring protests in 2012, which left a kind of power vacuum that the Houthis took advantage of. Shiite Houthi rebels have bombarded the president of Yemen's home and are trying to overthrow the government, says the information minister. And they seized the capital city Sana'a in 2014. You know, despite the fact that they hold the capital, they're not recognized as the Yemeni government by the international community.

They're still considered a rebel group. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced he will designate the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, and Abdulmalek al-Houthi and two other leaders as terrorists. They received substantial funding and weaponry from Iran, and they've been fighting this extremely brutal war against Yemen's internationally recognized government, along with forces from an international coalition, which is led by Saudi Arabia, and has also received quite a bit of support from the U.S. as well. It's been an absolutely brutal war. About 377,000 people have been killed. Most of those

are actually not due to the fighting themselves, but due to things like malnutrition, unsafe water, famine. Yemen's eight-year-long war has caused millions to flee their homes to camps like al-Jashar on the West Coast. Within seconds of arriving, we were surrounded by people begging for food and help. We don't even have a morsel, not a bit of rice to eat, he says. We have nothing. Things have gotten a bit better recently, actually. Like there was a ceasefire brokered by the UN in 2022. And since then, the fighting has died down. And the Saudis have actually been holding talks with the Houthis about sort of ongoing peace talks,

which are going on up until a few weeks before the October 7th attacks. The thing about the Houthis is they've never hid that they have sort of international ambitions. The official slogan of the group is, God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, and victory for Islam. So So not exactly subtle. But despite all that, they've generally been thought of as just a threat to Yemen itself or just a factor in Yemen or for the countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, who've been sort of actively involved in this coalition. This is the first time that they've really done something globally on this scale, I'd say. Do the Houthis have an advantage here? Well, I would say the advantage they have in this

case is geography. There are basically two entrances to the Red Sea. In the north, there's the Suez Canal. In the south, there's this narrow 20-mile straight Bab al-Mandab between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti on the coast of Africa. And the fact that about 12% of global trade has to pass through this very, very narrow choke point gives them some leverage. It means that with fairly limited resources, they can disrupt a whole lot of global commerce just because there's this very narrow area. And if you want to go through the Red Sea, there's no way around it. So what does that mean? Does that mean this stops when the Houthis decide they don't want

to do it anymore? What has basically happened is that in December, the U.S. announced this sort of international coalition, which they're calling Operation Prosperity Guardian. This was basically done at the behest of the shipping companies to sort of make transit through the Red Sea safe again. There was a pretty stunning op-ed in Lloyd's List, which is the kind of official journal of the international shipping industry, which actually explicitly called for a return of gunboat diplomacy, using this sort of term, from the 19th century, that the same way the British Navy protected shipping in the 19th century, that the international community should be doing this again. Let gunboat diplomacy be confined to the past. But there are legitimate uses of gunboats in the 21st century. The continued flow of world trade is one of them.

Wow, shots fired from Lloyd's List. Yeah, so we have a large flotilla contingent of ships in the Red Sea. The U.S. Defense Department saying four boats with Houthi rebels from Yemen firing on U.S. Navy helicopters. Those choppers firing back, sinking three of the four ships and killing all crew members on board. The fourth boat got away. They're pretty effective, it seems like, at shooting down these drones and missiles. It was an incident in recent days where they actually

sunk four Houthi attack boats. So it's getting a little more tense. The Houthis have said they're not going to stop, that they view this as a moral mission on behalf of the people of Gaza, on behalf of the Palestinian cause. They. And two, like, can they do enough in the Red Sea to make these shipping companies feel safe? The answer for now is not. How the Houthis' disruptions in the Red Sea affect you, me, and the rest of the world when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting

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I'm the captain now. Today Explained is back with Josh Keating. Josh, you mentioned that the Houthis will basically stop hijacking ships when they feel like it. How are shipping companies responding to that? Well, the big announcement last week was that Maersk, the major Danish shipping company, basically said it's going to keep sending its ships all the way around Africa. Maersk says one of its container shipments was targeted by a missile allegedly coming from a part of Yemen controlled by the Houthi rebels. And several other of the major shippers have done the same. One in five commercial ships are now avoiding the Red Sea because of the threat of attack. The Red Sea

accounts for 15% of the world's shipping and plays a crucial part in the global supply chain. It should be mentioned there is still shipping happening in the Red Sea. The volume is down about 20%, which tells you there is still a lot of shipping happening. The Suez Canal Authority is very keen for shipping to continue making that passage through the Red Sea. They've released a statement. They say the navigation through the Suez Canal flows normally as usual. Suez Canal will remain the fastest and shortest route, as opposed to, of course, that route around the Cape of Good Hope. The Houthis, interestingly, don't seem to be targeting energy shipments like oil and gas shipments yet. They're really focusing on these container ships,

perhaps because those are more associated with the Western powers they accuse of backing Israel rather than Middle Eastern countries that are producing the energy. It's been interesting to hear the way the Biden administration has sort of presented this. I was on a call with one senior administration official last week who was basically trying to sort of distance this operation from the U.S. support for Israel and Gaza, basically saying these are two different things that are, you know, protecting commerce in the Red Sea, protecting the global economy, like that this is something everybody should be signing up for, like whatever they think about the war in

Gaza. There is no justification for these attacks on global commerce, and we hope the world will join us in condemning these attacks and working to stop them. Our collective efforts remain open for additional countries to join in the crucial mission of defending the free flow of commerce in the Red Sea. I'm not sure that that message is quite getting across, given that, you know, they announced that there are going to be about 20 countries in this coalition that they formed, but they've only publicized the names of 12 of them, which suggests that there are a few countries that don't really want to be associated with a U.S.-led military effort in the Middle East right now. Yesterday, the Department of Defense announced the establishment of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational security initiative

focused on advancing security in the Red Sea in the face of this threat. We welcome the participation of our allies and partners, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain in confronting the threat. And that's why the United States is out there blowing up Houthi vessels? Well, it's been a long standing national security priority of the United States since the 70s, if not earlier, to make sure that, you know, particularly energy, but that trade can continue through this waterway. In the 1980s, there was a sort of series of U.S.-Iran skirmishes in this called the Tanker War. The war on land between Iran and Iraq is spilling over into the sea, with Western tankers being the sitting targets for both sides.

If they're going to pick up oil from Iran, they face the threat of attack by Iraqi planes armed with Exocet missiles. If they're going to the oil terminals on the other side, they face attack by Iranian planes. So there's some precedent, actually, for sort of U.S. and Iran or Iran-backed forces kind of exchanging fire to keep energy flowing from that region. So, you has more military resources in that region than any other country and is the one that shipping companies kind of turn to when this happens. In that context, another country that I didn't mention earlier is China, which also relies heavily on this sea route, both for shipping goods to Europe and for shipping energy from

the Middle East. They are not involved in Operation Prosperity Guardian. They do not appear to be involved militarily in any way. And the U.S. doesn't seem in a hurry to involve them for whatever reason. So that's an interesting wrinkle at this, particularly some of the ships that have come under attack have actually been Hong Kong flagged. So you would think they would have some stake in this. In years past, the US and China actually did collaborate combating Somali piracy, like not too far away from this, for instance. But this time, no collaboration between

the US and China on this problem. This feels like just like the latest reminder of how fragile our shipping is. There have been many recent reminders, right? Yeah. I mean, people may remember two years ago when the Ever Given, a cargo ship, got lodged sideways in the Suez Canal and shut that down for about a week. The 400-meter-long Ever Given got stuck on Tuesday morning, running aground in high winds reportedly after a power failure on board. A fleet of tugboats has been trying to refloat the megaship ever since, while a digger, tiny by comparison, tries to extricate her bow from the eastern bank.

That only lasted for a week, and it was sort of much lower stakes. This has the potential to be a much bigger disruption. I've spent most of the last two years, up until October, writing about the war in Ukraine. It's been my main focus. And that's been another case where these issues have come into play. Because there was sort of heavily mining and military activity in the Black Sea, Russia basically effectively blockaded the southern coast of Ukraine. And in that case, the key commodity wasn't energy or finished goods.

It was grain. Ukraine's a major exporter of grain, especially to actually countries like Egypt and in the Middle East and Africa. And so, you know, the UN got involved. There was a sort of deal that was brokered to allow grain shipments through. That fell apart. But a lot of the same issues actually were involved there. It was shippers needing assurances that they'd be safe, like worrying about freight rates and insurance. And it's just kind of a reminder of how much disruption that geopolitical tensions can cause this industry that the global economy could not function without.

Which I think people forget, right? Because you don't ever see a cargo ship unless you live in a port city. And even then, maybe you don't. You just order something online, and in two days or whatever whatever it's at your doorstep right and people involved in this industry say that like people only pay attention to them when something goes wrong and it's not just war that does this i mean an interesting dynamic right now is that at the same time the suez route is blocked the panama canal is actually operating at substantially reduced capacity because of drought. Severe drought is drying up the lakes that feed the canal, plunging water levels so low they've had to cut the number of vessels passing through from 36 to 32 per day, delaying goods and creating a growing waiting room of ships out at sea.

Some vessels are also being forced to carry up to 40% less cargo and slow down so they don't hit bottom. And so, you know, right now we're in this situation where you have both a war in the Middle East and the effects of climate change in Central America just sort of combining to create this massive disruption in the global shipping industry. This is a pretty adaptable industry. They're kind of used to dealing with contingencies, with bad weather, with closed canals. It's going to cause a disruption. We're sort of through the Christmas season now, which they say is a major time for the shipping industry.

The next one to watch is in February. It's going to be Lunar New Year in China, which is like a huge, huge time for commerce in that country and is always a time when there's a major uptick in shipping. But a lot of industry experts I've been reading and talking to say that we may be in for a disruption that's sort of on par with what we saw in COVID when you saw factories shutting down and shipping and there were shortages of certain goods because parts couldn't get there on time. We're sort of used to this just-in-time manufacturing model,

which depends on parts getting there on time, finished goods moving around. And for all the one-click e-commerce of it, a lot of it's still metal boxes on boats. And when something blocks those metal boxes from moving, it causes disruptions like all up and down the supply chain. Thank you. Thanks, Julian. Halima Shah and Hadi Mawagdi made our show today. Matthew Collette edited. Laura Bullard and Amanda Llewellyn fact-checked.

Patrick Boyd mixed and mastered. This is Today Explained. Thank you.