Perim Island, Yemen —
Stepping on to the Yemeni island of Perim is to relive history.
Its barren sand and rock moonscape feels for all the world like the land that time forgot. Its location, however, has put it at the heart of a very modern conflict.
For Perim Island sits in the Strait of Bab al-Mandab, a geopolitical pinch-point that’s taken on an outsized importance since US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran effectively shuttered the Strait of Hormuz.
To help keep global energy supplies flowing, and prices down, Saudi Arabia diverted its oil exports from Hormuz to the Red Sea.
But now Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, have begun an offensive that could land them control of Perim – and with it the ability to prevent ships passing through this narrow gateway from the Red Sea.
On Thursday the Houthis captured the town of Mocha, a crucial coastal location some 50 miles to the north of Perim.
On a recent day, an honor guard of Yemeni troops, patiently shuffling in the scorching sun, watched while a weathered officer’s outstretched hand helped arrivals to Perim off an aging gunboat. A CNN crew was among them, granted exclusive access to this dusty outpost.
The tableau, reminiscent of a bygone era, has likely played out here for centuries. The island’s position – at the narrowest point of a strait which brings the Horn of Africa within 12 miles of the Arabian Peninsula – has made it valuable to empires and regional powers for generations. Once a coaling station for ships of the British Empire sailing to India, Perim’s imperial past is still visible in its crumbling ruins.
Bumping along a rocky road to the island’s highest point, the officer – one hand on the wheel of his decrepit army truck – points to Eritrea and Djibouti across the water, on the African side of the strait. A veteran member of a brigade loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognized government, he knows his mission, defending Perim, also known as Mayyun, now carries far greater stakes than before.
For more than a decade, Yemen’s civil war appeared to be a distant regional conflict. But as fighting intensifies and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels launch attacks towards the Red Sea coast, that distinction is disappearing. Yemen, with Perim at the center, is becoming another potential front line in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran, and a reminder that the consequences of its war no longer stop at its shores.
Already, the Houthis control Yemen’s capital, swaths of the country’s northwest, and much of its Red Sea coastline north of the island.
If history is any guide, Bab al-Mandab – the smaller twin of the Strait of Hormuz and now a crucial alternative to it – could be where Iran, through its proxy, tightens the economic and political screws on Trump next, driving up oil prices and damaging Republican prospects in the US midterm elections in November.
“We told the world that this is an Iranian project, but no one listened to Yemenis back then… It’s geopolitical now,” Tarik Saleh, a vice president in Yemen’s beleaguered, internationally recognized government, told CNN in an exclusive interview.
Saleh, a nephew of the ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh and a former ally of the Houthis, is a rarity among Yemen’s political class: the only leader and military commander who remains inside the country while many others have fled. He says he has survived several assassination attempts and says Iran wants him dead. Meetings with him are arranged at short notice, in random locations, and are over fast.
Speaking to CNN from a tent on a remote Yemeni beach in late August, Saleh said he was receiving no help from the United States, “only talk.” He warned that if the Houthis seized Perim Island and gained control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, “then a massive (international) force and the navies will be needed” to dislodge them.
Even reaching Perim Island is a lesson in the dangers of this often one-sidedly high-tech war.
As the CNN team set out for the two-mile crossing from the mainland, warnings of an imminent Houthi drone attack forced the gunboat carrying the crew to turn back. Preparing for a possible attack, the gunner fired a heavy-caliber round from his rusting weapon.
Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, when Houthi rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, and drove the internationally recognized government into exile. Saudi Arabia led a military campaign the following year to dislodge the rebels. Iran has supplied the Houthis with weapons and training, and exercises some influence on the rebel group’s decisions.
The result is a fractured country, with the Houthis controlling the capital and the northwest, and the government and allied factions holding much of the south and east. Some 22 million people, roughly half of the population, need humanitarian assistance to this day.
Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war on Gaza, the Houthis joined the conflict. They launched attacks on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and targeted shipping in the Red Sea. The US and Israel launched airstrikes on the group that destroyed key assets. The Trump administration designated the Houthis as a terror group in 2025.
The latest Houthi offensive against Yemen’s government began in July. It ruptured a tacit four-year truce between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia and drew Yemen’s conflict into the wider war involving Iran.
In a rare exception to restrictions it has enforced over Yemeni airspace since intervening in 2015, Saudi Arabia permitted an Iranian passenger plane to land in Sanaa. The plane – the first direct air link between Tehran and Sanaa in about a decade – then carried a Houthi delegation to the funeral of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s former supreme leader, who was killed alongside several members of his family in the opening US-Israeli strikes of February 28.
But when the aircraft returned 10 days later, Saudi Arabia denied it permission to land in Sanaa amid concerns that it was also carrying Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel and military equipment. Saudi aircraft struck the airport’s runway, forcing the plane to divert to the Houthi-controlled Yemeni port city of Hodeidah.
The episode became a turning point, unraveling diplomacy that had largely preserved the informal truce and halted Houthi attacks on Saudi territory. Against the backdrop of the collapsing US-Iran ceasefire, the Houthis retaliated by declaring a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia and threatening ships carrying Saudi exports through Bab al-Mandab. They also launched missiles and drones at the kingdom’s oil infrastructure, airports and other civilian sites.
The timing of the new Houthi offensive could benefit Iran by increasing pressure on Trump. Mohammed Al-Basha, a former Yemeni government press officer and Washington, DC-based risk analyst, described the relationship between Tehran and the Houthis as “not a submissive relationship – but they are in bed together.”
Nonetheless, observers caution against framing the Houthis’ recent intervention as merely executing Iran’s regional agenda.
“The Houthis needed a war as diversion from domestic problems. They wanted to say they can fight Saudi Arabia into negotiating with them again. And of course, if it is going to help an old friend, like Iran, which at one point was the only friend they had, then why not?” said Farea Al-Muslimi, a Chatham House think tank research fellow.
The Houthi attacks on Israel, and the weakening of other Iranian allies in the region like Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, have elevated the Yemeni faction’s standing in the so-called axis of resistance and the Houthis wanted to capitalize on their new position, he added.
Sanaa officials have not responded to CNN’s request for comment. Houthi leaders have maintained in previous statements that their current offensive inside and outside Yemen is in response to “Saudi aggression and blockade.”
In a statement on Thursday, Nasr al-Din Amer, head of the Houthi-run state news agency Saba, told CNN that the aim of the rebels’ military campaign is to “break the siege unjustly imposed by the Saudi enemy for 12 years.”
Amer claimed the Houthis have control of Bab al-Mandab Strait and parts of the Red Sea through firepower, saying the operations are limited to Saudi vessels.
“We also target the troops mobilized by the Saudis for a territorial advance against us and the weapons the Saudis send to them,” he said.
Oil flows past Perim have already fallen sharply amid this maritime roulette. Three years ago, about 10% of the world’s seaborne oil trade passed through Bab al-Mandab. Kpler data indicates that volume has since fallen by half, and a sustained Houthi campaign could choke the route further.
Yemen’s fishermen are also victims of Houthi drone attacks. Dozens were evacuated from an island north of Perim after one such attack killed and injured several people, according to Yemeni government officials.
As fishermen wrestled their catches out of flimsy fiberglass boats near a makeshift shoreside market recently, several stopped to talk with CNN, complaining that the war is ruining business.
On normal days, one trader said, “there would be many ships out there,” but “because of the attack of the Houthi there are no ships right now.”
Children played in the Red Sea’s lukewarm waves. Apparently unconcerned about their parents’ worries, they jostled to get into the visiting journalists’ pictures.
But the image that emerges here is of an already war-weary, fragile and poor country being pushed ever closer to a breaking point.
A few miles up the coast, evidence of that is mounting.
The port of Mocha, the most northerly government-held city of significance on the Red Sea, has been hit hard. A few weeks ago, more than 25 Houthi rockets slammed into the sprawling harbor as commercial ships were unloading, according to port director Abdel Malek Al-Sharaabi.
In the water, half-sunk ships lie at improbable angles, while the concrete on land is scarred with holes deep enough to hide a large dog. Heaps of scorched motorcycle frames lie beside piles of semi-melted engines.
Sixteen people were killed and 22 injured that day, the port director told CNN, while six commercial ships were sunk and 14,000 motorcycles lost. The Houthis, he said, want to destroy the economy.
“The port had a big role in development and commerce,” Al-Sharaabi said. “This attack aims at hurting this development and stopping services.”
Over the past year, the Houthis have repeatedly fired at targets as far as Israel, more than 1,000 miles away. They claim to possess hypersonic missiles and have an arsenal that includes long-range, sea-skimming anti-ship missiles designed to evade radar. They also possess surface-to-air missiles capable of downing high-altitude US drones and threatening crewed aircraft.
On Yemen’s front lines, fighting between Houthi and government forces is intensifying. Government troops are flying new, first-person-view, or FPV, quadcopter drones, attacking concealed Houthi bunkers.
“Our troops have improved due to training and new resources like drones,” Saleh told CNN.
But for every step the government takes, officials say, Iran is trying to keep the Houthis ahead. A journey in a vehicle with blacked-out windows to a heavily guarded warehouse at a secret location offered a glimpse of that challenge – and what the government says is evidence of the scale of Iranian support for the Houthis, including the provision of weapons capable of threatening tanker traffic in the Red Sea.
Abdel Nasser El Mamlouh, the director of Saleh’s military media operation, led CNN through what he said was an Iranian-made weapons shipment captured before smugglers could deliver it to the Houthis.
The cache included enormous, 18-foot-long missiles, complex long-range radar systems, drone engines and optical equipment, even bullets hidden inside a truck battery. Everything, El Mamlouh said, had been disguised as commercial equipment to evade detection.
And what they captured, he readily acknowledged, was only a fraction of what is believed to have made it through. Smugglers “confessed that before this one they had smuggled 11 shipments similar in size and content,” he said, amounting to 750 tons.
If the Houthis seized Perim and gained a foothold in Bab al-Mandab, he warned, they would no longer need long-range weapons to threaten shipping.
“They would mine the strait, just like (Iran) did in Hormuz,” he said.
Along Yemen’s government-held stretch of Red Sea coast, officials have little doubt that their civil war has become part of something much larger.
“(We are) fighting this war on behalf of the Arab world and the international community,” Mamlouh said.
Before hurrying away from his tent on the beach, Saleh was asked what would happen if US support never came.
“We will pay a higher price in the future,” to dislodge the Houthis, he replied. And so, he warned, would “the American army, the international community and international trade.”
CNN’s Sarah El Sirgany contributed to this report.
