Yemen's internationally recognised government has opened a ground offensive on al-Waziiya, a mountainous district in Taiz governorate that functions as the geographic lock on the Red Sea port of Mocha and, by extension, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The operation, launched Tuesday by the Homeland Shield Forces, is the first serious territorial push under the "Dawn of Yemen" campaign announced Sunday by Presidential Leadership Council chairman Rashad al-Alimi, which explicitly aims to retake all Houthi-held territory including Sanaa. The operational logic is straightforward terrain denial. The Houthis seized Mocha and areas around the Bab al-Mandeb in a lightning advance last month. Al-Waziiya's mountain ridges east of Mocha are the high ground that made that seizure possible. As Al Jazeera's Yousef Mawry reported from Sanaa, the government cannot credibly contest Mocha without first controlling al-Waziiya. The Yemeni military claims it has secured strategic hills overlooking the al-Mansoura area and that Houthi forces are in retreat; the Houthis deny this and say the advance was repelled. The escalation extends well beyond a single district. Saudi Arabia confirmed 100 coalition fighter jets are providing air support for the broader offensive. Simultaneously, the Houthis launched a ballistic missile at Khamis Mushait, which the coalition says it intercepted, and struck King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz airport in Jazan and Najran airport near the Yemeni border, wounding three people and causing material damage. The Houthis said they targeted sites across southern Saudi Arabia including airports and military installations. The coalition architecture is expanding. Pakistan and Turkiye have agreed to activate deterrence measures under their mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia and rapidly deploy forces to the Gulf kingdom. This is a significant widening of the conflict's diplomatic and military footprint — from a Saudi-led coalition war to one with NATO-member and nuclear-power participation in defensive posture. The "Dawn of Yemen" framing — retaking all territory including Sanaa, which the Houthis have held since 2014 — is maximalist by design. A decade of Saudi-led intervention failed to dislodge the Houthis from the capital. What has changed is the Houthi seizure of the Bab al-Mandeb corridor, which transformed them from a local insurgency into a threat to global shipping chokepoints. That escalation appears to have unlocked coalition resources and international participation that years of humanitarian catastrophe did not. The immediate question is whether the al-Waziiya offensive can hold gains in mountain terrain against an entrenched defender with ballistic missile capability, or whether this becomes another attritional exchange in a war that has already consumed over a decade. The Houthis' simultaneous strikes on Saudi airports signal they retain deep-strike capacity regardless of ground losses. The coalition's air superiority is real but has never been sufficient to determine outcomes in Yemen's terrain.
