The Iran-backed Houthis expanded their control over the strategy Bab-el-Mandeb strait, as strikes continued in the Strait of Hormuz.
Page A3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 13 September 2026
CENTCOM calls Hormuz mine-free a 'major milestone,' Houthis take the other strait two weeks later
As it ran on the front
On August 28th a CENTCOM spokesman stood up and told the country that Navy divers and SEALs had "meticulously and quietly cleared" the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines, and he used the phrase "major milestone" like it was a word he'd been saving. Fine. Believe him. The mines are gone. Write it down.
Nine days later, on September 7th, Iran announced an exclusion zone outside that same strait — a warning to any ship still thinking about using it — after the US had already hit three Iranian tankers. So the mines were gone but the strait wasn't exactly open for business, it was just open for the next round.…
…(cont) Then the story stops being about Hormuz at all, because while everyone was admiring the milestone, the Houthis were three days into taking Mocha, the port city fifty miles from Bab-el-Mandeb — the other chokepoint, the one nobody put on a briefing slide, the one that moves twelve percent of everything that gets shipped on this planet. September 11th: Mocha falls. Same day: Perim Island falls, sitting dead center in the strait like a cork in a bottle. A former Pentagon official went on Fox and called it a "kill box," which is the kind of phrase you reach for when you need "we lost the island" to sound like a plan.
By September 13th CBS is reporting the Houthis have expanded to full control of the shipping lane, Tehran's own state media is calling an attack on its own cargo ship the work of a "terrorist enemy" without naming one — because naming one means admitting which faction of your own government did it — and one person is dead on that ship. Two chokepoints in, and the count of people who didn't get a press conference: 85,818 Yemeni civilians, forced out of their homes in the last few days alone, fifty-six thousand of them from Taiz, two thousand and climbing across the border into Djibouti.
That's the whole trick, and it's not new — it's the oldest one there is. You get a milestone for the strait you cleared. Nobody gets a milestone for the strait you lost, and nobody at all gets one for the people walking out of Mocha with what they can carry. The mines were the easy problem. They always pick the easy problem to solve on camera.
“They clear one strait and call a press conference, the other one gets handed over and it's a "kill box" — same week, same war, and only one of those gets a milestone. Eighty-five thousand people walking out of Yemen with what's on their back didn't make it onto anybody's slide, because that number doesn't have a ribbon to cut. You want to know who's winning a war, don't watch the podium — count the people leaving.”
“CENTCOM's mine-clearance was Hormuz, and Hormuz is still open — that's the milestone, and it stands. Bab-el-Mandeb is a different theater, a different command problem, you can't hang a Yemen ground war on a Navy dive team. And the "kill box" framing means we're not losing the island, we're luring them into it — that's not a retreat, that's a trap. Did I say trap? That's — that's actually not bad, I'm keeping that.”
The receipts
FORCES of the Houthi-led Yemeni government took over Yemen’s port city of Mokha on Thursday, an area vital to controlling shipping through the Red Sea, according to reports. Mokha is about 50 miles from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway that connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and through which about 12 per cent of the world’s…
Houthi fighters on Thursday took control of a key port city on the west coast of Yemen, putting them in a stronger position to disrupt commercial shipping—and to potentially send oil prices rocketing even higher. According to Reuters, the Houthis seized the city of Mocha from Saudi-backed forces before moving toward the Hanish Islands…
Hopes to end the war were dashed when Iran attacked three vessels sailing in the Strait of Hormuz -- an attack greenlit not by Tehran's army, but by its newly appointed paramilitary chief.
One person was killed in an attack against an Iranian cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran claimed, though it notably didn’t identify the perpetrator. Iranian state media outlet IRNA quoted the governor of Qeshm as blaming the attack on a “terrorist enemy,” though he didn’t specify which.
Houthi rebels seized Perim Island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, but a former Pentagon official warns they've entered a vulnerable U.S. Navy kill box.
The United Nations agency for migration issues said Sunday that 85,818 Yemeni people have been forcibly displaced in recent days by renewed fighting between Houthi forces and the Saudi-backed government as the Houthis seized control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway for global oil shipping. More than 2,000 people fled to…
The Iranian-backed Houthi militants have seized a key island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a strategic maritime chokepoint linking the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, as the group expands its control along Yemen’s western coastline. Officials with Yemen’s Saudi-backed government confirmed that Houthi forces reached Perim Island, also known…
· Iran to impose new ‘exclusion zone’ outside Strait of Hormuz from the morgue, 7 Sep 2026
· Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes are ‘free of Iranian sea mines,’ marking ‘major milestone’ in the Iran war: CENTCOM from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.