The Houthis Enter the Iran War: Bab al-Mandeb, a Failed Kurdish Plan, and a Regime Fracturing

The war on Iran has just acquired a new front, and it sits astride one of the most important waterways on the planet. Slightly over a month into the conflict, Yemen’s Houthis formally entered the fight on a Saturday in late March, firing ballistic missiles at what they called “sensitive military positions” in southern Israel and following up hours later with a second wave of cruise missiles and drones. All of it was intercepted.

None of it killed anyone. And yet the move sent a tremor through nearly every capital on Earth—because the danger the Houthis pose has very little to do with the missiles they launched, and everything to do with their geography.

From their positions in Yemen, the Houthis sit over the Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow maritime gateway at the southern mouth of the Red Sea. With the Strait of Hormuz already in a state of semi-closure thanks to Iran, the prospect of a second chokepoint going dark at the same time is the kind of scenario that moves oil markets and rattles governments. The group has not pulled that trigger—not yet—but its leadership has made clear it understands exactly what the threat is worth.

Key Takeaways

The Houthis formally entered the war in late March with intercepted missile and drone strikes on southern Israel, opening a second front against Iran’s adversaries.
The real strategic danger is the Bab al-Mandeb strait; with the Strait of Hormuz already semi-closed, a simultaneous Houthi closure could send oil prices past the 2008 record of $147.50 a barrel, per a Goldman Sachs warning.
Iran shut down Hormuz without laying a single mine—the credible threat of striking tankers, backed by an actual early-war strike on one, was enough to halt most traffic.
A secret Mossad-developed plan to send tens of thousands of Iranian Kurdish fighters across the border under US and Israeli air cover collapsed after a March 4th Fox News leak and a lack of US guarantees.
The US is building toward a larger footprint: roughly 2,500 Marines arrived, the 82nd Airborne is en route, and the Pentagon is reportedly weighing another 10,000 troops.
Iran’s leadership is fracturing publicly, with President Pezeshkian reportedly clashing with the IRGC while Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen since the war’s opening strikes.
Even amid internal chaos, Tehran is projecting power abroad—most visibly in Lebanon, where its ambassador is defying an expulsion order with Hezbollah and Amal backing.

Layered underneath the Houthi escalation is a second revelation that surfaced over the same weekend: this war had a secret ground component all along. According to a detailed Israeli investigative report, Mossad spent years developing a plan to use Kurdish fighters as the boots on the ground that an air campaign alone could never provide—a force meant to push “all the way to Tehran.” It did not go according to plan.

What follows is a picture of a conflict that is metastasizing in several directions at once: a maritime crisis waiting to happen, a collapsed regime-change gambit, a diplomatic process that may be partly fictional, and an Iranian government turning on itself even as it continues to project power abroad. This is what the Iran war looks like roughly a month in.

Late to the Party: The Houthis Open a New Front

WarFronts had argued only the previous Friday that the Houthis could badly tip the scales if they chose to go all-in on the Iran war—and to severely understate the case, the outcome would not be great for the rest of the world. The very next day, the group threw its hat into the ring.

Saturday marked the formal entry. Ballistic missiles aimed at “sensitive military positions” in southern Israel triggered sirens across Beersheba, followed hours later by a second wave of cruise missiles and drones. Every one of these was fully intercepted, with no casualties or damage reported on the Israeli side. Sunday, by contrast, was quiet—no additional launches and no fresh claims from Houthi media—which pushed the all-out war scenario off to the side, at least for the moment.

But the missiles were never the point. The concern that rippled through world capitals had almost nothing to do with the projectiles themselves and far more to do with the Bab al-Mandeb strait, and what happens to the global oil supply if the Houthis decide to shut it down. So far they have not moved in that direction. Dozens of tankers were still transiting the Red Sea daily as of early Monday. The question is whether that holds.

Why the Bab al-Mandeb Matters More Than Ever

The Red Sea matters for global trade in the best of times. With the Strait of Hormuz in a state of semi-closure for weeks, it matters a great deal more. And the way Hormuz was shut down is worth understanding, because Iran never actually had to physically blockade it or lay a single mine. The threat of launching on tankers—backed up by the fact that Iran did, in fact, strike a tanker in the war’s early days—was enough to effectively close the whole thing.

Within days, the risk climbed so high that most ship owners simply stopped sailing altogether.

That has turned the Bab al-Mandeb, a 26-kilometer gap between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, into something close to indispensable. Saudi Arabia has maxed out its East-West Petroline at seven million barrels a day to push crude across the peninsula to Red Sea ports. Egyptian oil is funneling through pipelines to the Mediterranean, and refineries along the coast are pumping out hundreds of thousands of barrels of diesel and jet fuel bound for Europe and North America. Nearly six million barrels a day are now transiting the strait—and that volume had been growing.

Or at least, it was growing.

The Houthis know precisely what that is worth, because they have already proven they can bring this corridor to a halt. Their 2023–2025 campaign against Red Sea shipping drove major carriers to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, collapsed Suez Canal traffic from 70 ships a day to under 30, and surged insurance premiums twentyfold—all without shutting the strait entirely.

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The Nightmare Scenario the Markets Are Pricing

Fast forward to today, and roughly 30 tankers near the Saudi port of Yanbu sit within Houthi strike range. Elisabeth Kendall at Cambridge called a simultaneous closure of both chokepoints “a nightmare scenario” that would “disrupt, if not cripple, trade toward Europe.” Goldman Sachs has warned that if flows stay depressed for another two months, oil prices could blow past the 2008 all-time high of $147.50 a barrel.

That scenario has not materialized—yet. What the Houthis’ deputy information minister, Mohammed Mansour, said on Saturday is that the group is “conducting this battle in stages,” and that closing the strait is “among our options.” It is, in effect, the geopolitical equivalent of admiring a nice shipping route and noting that it would be a shame if something happened to it.

That is not to say the Houthis are guaranteed to use what amounts to their nuclear option. Unlike their attacks of a few years ago, the Red Sea now carries a newfound importance not just for the US and Israel but, at this point, for most of the world. Closing it really would be the closest thing to a nuclear option the group has—and once that line is crossed, there is no uncrossing it.

Analysts at various think tanks have agreed that while they cannot rule out the Houthis making such a move, the Bab al-Mandeb is more valuable as a threat than as a weapon, especially given the years of back-and-forth the group has been locked into with Saudi Arabia. A standing threat preserves leverage; a closure spends it.

A Diplomatic Process That May Be Partly Fiction

That logic of leverage extends to what has allegedly been going on between the White House and Iran. As a quick recap: the previous Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social claiming “very good and productive conversations” with Iran and announced a pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure until the end of the day on Friday. That deadline was extended again, now running through April 6th—and it remains very much up in the air whether he will make good on it the third time around.

There was always something a little off about the negotiations Trump described. For one, they were remarkably well timed: announced right before markets opened, with a deadline set for after markets closed for the weekend. The suspicion deepened given that Iran has steadfastly denied, the entire time, that any such negotiations were happening at all—across every layer of government, from the political class like Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi down to the IRGC itself.

A bit more clarity arrived courtesy of US Representative Jim Himes, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who went on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and did not mince words. Speaking about Trump, Himes declared: “Last Sunday, he realized, ‘I’ve got a financial cataclysm in the market,’ so he just made that statement up.”

That claim cannot be independently verified, and there may be more happening behind the scenes than members of the House are read into. There are at least indirect channels: Pakistan has emerged as something of a would-be peacemaker, hosting several regional powers for talks over the weekend. Still, Himes’s accusation stands out. What is left is a diplomatic process real enough to point to but nowhere near advanced enough to produce results.

The current deadline—April 6th, 8:00 p.m. Eastern—appears to be the next indicator of where things head from here.

The Best Laid Plans: A Secret Kurdish Ground War

Going into this war, there was considerable debate in analyst circles about whether the coalition could topple the Islamic Republic through an air campaign alone. It was a genuine uncertainty. Analysts skewed slightly toward skepticism, but this was uncharted territory: the regime had just carried out a barbaric crackdown on its own people, killing an estimated 36,500 over the span of 48 hours alone.

The US and Israel together field, quite literally, the most advanced weapon systems on Earth, and were clear that they were bringing what they believed would be needed. Had technology, precision strikes, and drone warfare advanced to the point where such a mission could, at least theoretically, succeed?

On the other side of the argument, regime change from the air alone is almost unheard of, in no small part because bombing campaigns can only do so much to change the situation on the ground. Trump’s thinking largely seemed to be that the previous “forever wars” in the Middle East—the ones he had himself complained about—needlessly committed boots on the ground, and that he could deliver something more effective.

Then came the weekend’s revelation. Israel’s Channel 12 aired a detailed investigative report confirming that Mossad had spent years developing a plan to use Kurdish fighters as the ground force the air campaign could not provide. Tens of thousands of armed fighters from a coalition of Iranian Kurdish opposition groups would cross the Iran-Iraq border under massive US and Israeli air cover in the war’s opening days, link up with Kurdish networks inside the country, and push deep into Iran to ignite a broader uprising.

This was not some provincial plan to set up shop in Kurdish-dominated areas. The plan was that they would go “all the way to Tehran.”

How the Plan Came Together—and Came Apart

Mossad chief David Barnea reportedly briefed Netanyahu directly before the operation kicked off, then traveled to Washington in January to pitch it to Trump’s team. Netanyahu was an enthusiastic backer; this was the low-footprint regime-change operation he had long been dreaming of. According to the report, it was also an influential factor in convincing Trump to greenlight the February 28th strikes. IDF military intelligence, however, was skeptical from the start, giving it slim chances—though the report noted that if things did kick off, they were confident “the Kurds would do their part.”

As the strikes began, the CIA went into overdrive. Trump was on the phone with Kurdish leaders. US and Israeli jets hammered Iranian security forces and Basij sites in the northwest to clear the corridor, and there were reports that some fighters had already begun limited cross-border operations.

This remains a breaking story that military historians will likely study for years. But from what can be told so far, the full-scale invasion never launched—in large part because the Kurdish factions wanted assurances that were not coming: a no-fly zone overhead, ground support to keep their fighters from becoming cannon fodder for the IRGC, and political commitments from an administration unwilling to promise enough.

On March 4th, Fox News broke the story that thousands of Iraqi Kurds had launched a ground offensive into Iran. The Kurdish groups were horrified that the operation had been made public, and whatever momentum existed collapsed almost immediately. Iran reinforced the northwest border. Erdogan pressured Trump to shut the whole thing down. And the Kurds—who got burned by Trump back in 2019, when he pulled out of Syria and left them without support—were not going an inch further.

What’s Left: A Larger US Footprint and a Wary Public

So if Plan A collapsed, what is left? By all indications, the answer is the extended April 6th deadline, as vague as that may be. But unlike past deadlines, when this one rolls around there will be significant numbers of US forces in theater: roughly 2,500 Marines arrived Friday, the 82nd Airborne is en route, and the Pentagon is reportedly weighing another 10,000 on top of that.

For context, that is still a fraction of the 250,000 troops that invaded Iraq—though it is unclear whether that distinction will register in public perception. A slight majority of Americans have opposed the war since day one, but it has not exactly been a top-of-mind concern; fewer than 20 percent told CNN they cared “a great deal.” After years of military operations, bombing the Middle East is not exactly new. Republicans, for their part, have consistently backed the campaign, with more than 80 percent expressing support.

Any form of invasion would be an entirely different proposition. Trump is the president who ran on “peace through strength” and “no new wars.” Pivoting from that to an air campaign against Iran is one thing; escalating to a full, boots-on-the-ground operation—especially after explicitly guaranteeing that the war would not involve such a deployment—is something else entirely. With the midterms looming, it would be one enormous gamble.

The Wreckage Inside Tehran

It is against this backdrop that a simmering tension between President Pezeshkian, who has stayed remarkably out of the headlines since the war began, and the Revolutionary Guards broke into the open. Opposition outlet Iran International, citing sources inside the regime, reported on Saturday that Pezeshkian has been continuously criticizing the IRGC’s policy of escalating attacks across the region and demanding that control of the government be returned to the civilian side. Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi rejected this outright and turned the blame back on Pezeshkian, accusing his administration of failing to implement the structural reforms needed before the war to ensure stability.

If the report is to be believed, the Islamic Republic’s governance structure has descended into a finger-pointing competition between the civilian parts of the government and the IRGC-linked parts. That is not entirely new; the two sides clashed in early March when Pezeshkian apologized to Iran’s neighbors for the attacks, which infuriated the Guards and prompted them to launch even more strikes simply to send a message. Netanyahu, speaking at IDF Northern Command in Safed, framed all of it as vindication that the campaign is working, describing “visible cracks in the terror regime in Tehran.”

Whether that is an intelligence assessment, political messaging, or a combination depends on whom you ask. But the leak is significant, because it offers a fresh look at how Iran is—or is not—being governed.

Given the widespread uncertainty about the whereabouts and health of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—who has not been seen in public or on video since reportedly being injured in the war’s opening strikes—the question of who actually holds the reins in Tehran remains unclear. Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf has emerged as one potential figure trying to hold things together, but even he cannot paper over a government where nobody is sure who is actually in charge. And yet, for all that internal chaos, Tehran is still finding the bandwidth to project power abroad.

Lebanon: The Stand Tehran Refuses to Abandon

The clearest example is Lebanon. Beirut’s government set a March 29th deadline for Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Reza Sheibani, to leave the country, declaring him “persona non grata.” Sheibani did not merely ignore the deadline—he rejected it outright, with staff informing AFP that he had no plans to leave, in direct defiance of Beirut’s orders.

The showdown may look inconsequential, given that it concerns a single man, but it will help determine much of what comes next for Lebanon. Tehran has long viewed Lebanon as being “in their pocket” through the influence that Hezbollah and their Shia allies, the Amal party, hold over the country. Even with a literal war going on at home, Tehran is focused on making a stand here, betting that the Lebanese state will not have it in them to unify and expel the ambassador—a demonstration of who is really in charge when push comes to shove.

They may have a point. Hezbollah’s decision to support the ambassador staying is no surprise, but Amal has backed his continued presence as well, boycotting the cabinet meeting where the expulsion was to be discussed in order to freeze the process entirely. An Iranian diplomatic source told AFP that the ambassador “will not leave Lebanon, in accordance with the wishes of the speaker of parliament Nabih Berri and of Hezbollah.”

Sovereignty on Paper, Power in Practice

That gap between what the state enacts on paper and what it can actually enforce is the story of modern Lebanon in a nutshell—and it is especially unfortunate given the initial progress Beirut made in early March. To be clear, the Lebanese state did implement the expulsion legally. Foreign Minister Raggi intentionally went around Berri to avoid Amal’s stalling. Under the Vienna Convention, a foreign minister can declare an ambassador persona non grata on his own authority—no cabinet vote, no parliamentary sign-off, no input from a Speaker required.

And yet the ambassador remains on Lebanese soil.

Only time will tell how that plays out, but if Lebanon wants to demonstrate that it is a sovereign country, what has to follow is clear. While the standoff unfolded in Beirut, the IDF has been pushing deeper into Lebanon’s south. Netanyahu ordered the 146th Division to drive the “buffer zone” deeper into southern Lebanon, explicitly closer to the Litani—and expanded evacuation zones north of the Litani, which has no historical precedent.

This is not yet a full-scale Israeli invasion, but it is another step in that direction. With much of the world’s attention fixed a few countries to the east, the assault on Lebanon may yet prove one of the most consequential acts of the entire war.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and how did the Houthis enter the Iran war?

The Houthis formally entered on a Saturday in late March, firing ballistic missiles at what they described as “sensitive military positions” in southern Israel, which triggered sirens across Beersheba. A second wave of cruise missiles and drones followed hours later. All of the projectiles were fully intercepted, with no casualties or damage reported on the Israeli side.

Why is the Bab al-Mandeb strait so important in this conflict?

The Bab al-Mandeb is a 26-kilometer gap between Yemen and the Horn of Africa that controls access to the Red Sea. With the Strait of Hormuz already in semi-closure, the Red Sea has become close to indispensable, carrying nearly six million barrels of oil a day. The Houthis have demonstrated, during their 2023–2025 campaign, that they can paralyze the corridor—and a simultaneous closure of both chokepoints could send oil prices past the 2008 record of $147.50 a barrel.

What was the secret Kurdish ground plan and why did it collapse?

According to a Channel 12 investigative report, Mossad spent years developing a plan to use tens of thousands of Iranian Kurdish opposition fighters as a ground force to cross the Iran-Iraq border under massive US and Israeli air cover, link up with Kurdish networks inside Iran, and push “all the way to Tehran.” The full-scale invasion never launched because the Kurdish factions demanded assurances—a no-fly zone, ground support, and firm political commitments—that never materialized. After Fox News broke the story on March 4th, momentum collapsed, Iran reinforced its northwest border, and Erdogan pressured Trump to shut it down.

What is happening inside Iran’s government?

President Pezeshkian has reportedly been criticizing the IRGC’s policy of escalating regional attacks and demanding that control return to the civilian side, while Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi has blamed Pezeshkian in return. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen since reportedly being injured in the war’s opening strikes, leaving the question of who holds power in Tehran unresolved, with Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf among those trying to hold things together.

What is the standoff over Iran’s ambassador in Lebanon about?

Beirut declared Iran’s ambassador Mohammad Reza Sheibani “persona non grata” with a March 29th deadline to leave, but Sheibani rejected the order outright and remained in the country. Hezbollah and Amal both backed his continued presence—Amal even boycotted the cabinet meeting where the expulsion was to be discussed—demonstrating Tehran’s ability to project power through proxy influence even while fighting a war at home.