Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed, Yemen's former prime minister and current adviser to President Rashad al-Alimi, is making a blunt case to the west: the battle around Taiz is not a local firefight but a contest for control of the Bab al-Mandab strait. Lose Taiz, he argues, and the road to Aden and the strait itself falls to Houthi control. The rest of Yemen follows. Saeed's timeline of Houthi missile capability tells the more structural story. In 2017, the Houthis had "blind missiles" that missed their targets. By December 2020, ballistic missiles fired from Sana'a struck Aden airport 186 miles away, killing 28 and wounding 107 — including Saeed himself. In January 2022, Houthi missiles hit Abu Dhabi oil infrastructure more than 900 miles away. By 2025, the group possessed "dozens of targeted missiles, land sea missiles and drones." Iranian manufacturing lines expanded inside Yemen, Iranian experts trained Houthi operators from Sana'a, and the group became what Saeed calls "a unified front with Iran." The military dynamics around Taiz are grim. Houthi forces launched a coastal offensive in September 2024 that ended four years of relative calm following the 2022 UN-brokered ceasefire. Taiz, a city of more than 500,000, now faces attack from four axes. Government forces have only light weapons, and Saeed admits coordination between the National Shield Forces, National Resistance Forces, and Giants Brigades has been poor. Saudi Arabia, the government's chief backer, "did not plan at an early stage for this escalation." Saeed characterizes the Houthi approach to Taiz as classic siege doctrine: allow fuel and commodities into the urban core to avoid immediate crisis, while expanding control of rural areas and smaller cities. "In a matter of days there will be a full siege and they will try to enter the city," he warned. "It will be much worse than the siege of 2015." He described Taiz as a modern, democratic city and predicted the Houthis would rapidly impose Zaydi education, financial, and tax systems — dismantling what he calls "the idea of the modern state in Yemen." The coalition politics are fractured. Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the exiled leader of the southern secessionist Southern Transitional Council, called for southern mobilisation against the Houthis on Tuesday and brought tens of thousands onto streets on Wednesday — but coupled this with a demand for a secession referendum within two years. Riyadh would find that condition difficult to accept. The competition between Gulf states and the gap between the 2022 truce and the 2024 restart left government forces unreorganised. Saeed's most consequential claim is about replicability. He frames Iran's investment in the Houthis as a "new model of war" — semi-state actors and militias threatening powerful states with cheap technologies and smuggled third-party components. "The way Iran has invested in the Houthis could become a model for threatening navigation elsewhere," he warned. This is not the old terrorism of ISIS and al-Qaida. It is state-sponsored asymmetric warfare that requires fundamentally different air defences and strategic assumptions. Gulf countries, he said, "have to reshape and rethink their defences." The September timing of the Houthi coastal offensive is not accidental in Saeed's reading. Iran was under heavy pressure — its airports degraded, 90% of its oil flowing through Hormuz. The Houthis struck Saudi east-to-west pipelines. "The only thing Iran can do is to keep expanding the consequences of the war for America," Saeed said. The logic is clear: when Tehran is squeezed, its proxies escalate on other fronts to raise the cost of pressure.
