The American website Fox claimed that the Yemeni Ansar Allah Houthi group is spreading chaos in the global economy by targeting commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea.
The website stated in a report that captains of container ships who sail between Europe and Asia are about to return to sailing on the long journey around the African continent via the Cape of Good Hope, a trade route that has remained largely neglected since the opening of the Suez Canal more than 150 years ago.
Since mid-November, ships in the Red Sea have been subjected to attacks by the Houthis in Yemen with drones and missiles, and in some cases they board the ships and seize them.
The Houthis say that their attacks come in solidarity with the massacres that Gaza is being subjected to at the hands of Israel. The number of martyrs in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israeli war rose to 20,674 martyrs, while the number of wounded reached 54,536, according to what the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip announced on Monday.
Major companies
Because of these attacks, most major container shipping companies – including Denmark’s Maersk, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, and China’s COSCO – stopped their shipments through the Red Sea. The British oil company BP also did so. Ships carrying an estimated 7 million barrels of oil usually pass through the sea daily.
According to a Fox report written by Joshua Keating – one of Fox’s top foreign policy and global news correspondents – the Houthi attacks are an “unexpected” consequence of the two-month-old war, which is rapidly turning into a broader conflict with implications at the regional and global levels.
Noam Raydan, an analyst for air cargo operations in the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that the impact is no longer limited to one country, “it has now become global.”
According to the American website, ships changing their course from the Red Sea will add thousands of miles and days to their trips through the Cape of Good Hope, which will cost companies millions of dollars to purchase additional amounts of fuel and other costs.
While ships are still venturing through the Red Sea, ship tracking website VesselFinder shows that many have their own transponders to broadcast that they have armed guards on board.
Pressure
American, French, and British ships in the region have been shooting down dozens of Houthi drones, but Western governments have been under pressure to make more efforts to protect maritime shipping.
In this regard, the United States announced last Tuesday the formation of a maritime task force of 10 countries to protect navigation in the region. Fox reported that the administration of US President Joe Biden is also considering launching direct military attacks against the Houthi group.
But there does not seem to be an easy way out of the crisis, and he reveals how the combination of geography, economics, technology and geopolitics can allow a “rebellious and relatively small” group – as he described it – to cause an astonishing amount of chaos in the global economy.
Amazing technical capabilities
The author of the Fox report believes that the Houthis’ actions in the conflict are the most daring in some respects, due to their physical distance from the scene of the fighting. Since last October, the Houthis have been launching missiles and drones at Israel, which is more than a thousand miles away from Yemen.
Some of their attacks on ships have demonstrated impressive technical capabilities, including what may be the first-ever combat use of an anti-ship ballistic missile by any military, according to Fox.
The report goes on to remind that about 2% of global trade and 10% of global oil trade passes through the Red Sea, which is a body of water defined by two narrow crossings: the Egyptian Suez Canal in the north, and Bab al-Mandab, separating the states of Yemen and Djibouti, to the south.
Some countries may feel the impact of attacks on ships directly, such as the cash-strapped Egyptian government, which earns more than $9 billion annually from Suez Canal transit fees. Other countries – as stated in the Fox report – will face indirect effects.
