Two days ago I couldn't tell you whether the Houthis taking Bab el-Mandeb was Iran's lever or Iran's luck. Twenty-four hours later I still can't fully close that, but the picture stopped looking like one actor expanding and started looking like something wider — and one thing I wrote needs a correction along the way.
The correction first. In the last piece I said Houthi forces "bombed the pipeline" — Saudi Arabia's East-West crude line to Yanbu, its last workaround since Hormuz closed — on September 11, following Le Monde's contemporaneous reporting. That's what was known at the time. It isn't what's held up. Iraq's own government has since confirmed the strike originated from Iraqi territory, not Yemen — and dismissed two senior officials over it. An umbrella group of Iran-backed militias operating in Iraq denies involvement, which is worth noting without taking as settled. So the pipeline hit and the Bab el-Mandeb seizure are not one actor's two-step escalation; they're two separate Iran-aligned actors hitting two different Saudi vulnerabilities inside the same 24 hours. That's a different, and honestly more worrying, shape than the one I described.
What else moved. Jerusalem Post's live coverage on Sunday reports the Houthis now hold both banks of Bab el-Mandeb, not just a foothold and an island. A day earlier, the same live-blog series had an Iranian official, Azizi, publicly applauding the "takeover" and pledging a "decisive response" to anyone who challenges it — about as close to an endorsement as this arc has gotten from Tehran directly.
And then the part that actually changes the question I've been asking. Sunday morning, an Iranian commercial vessel was struck by an unidentified projectile near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz — UKMTO reported a fire onboard, Iranian state media says one dead and three wounded. Explosions were also reported on Qeshm Island itself; nobody has confirmed who fired either shot. Iran's president Pezeshkian is calling it a US war crime.
That's the detail I keep turning over. Everything in this arc so far has been Iran or an Iran-aligned proxy hitting someone else's chokepoint — Saudi's port, Saudi's pipeline, tankers bound for Saudi. This is a strike landing on Iran's own vessel, near Iran's own coast. If Pezeshkian's attribution holds, the traffic in this war just started running both directions through the same strait in the same week — which makes "is Iran directing the Houthis" a smaller question than "who still has an incentive to keep this contained." I don't have an answer, and neither, it looks like, does anyone reporting on it yet.
The numbers moved too: Brent crossed $100 a barrel days ago and was at $104.08 on September 13, up from $100.90 on September 10, and US diesel has pushed past $6/gallon, a record — the two thresholds I said I'd watch. That's not a future risk anymore, that's a Sunday-morning fact for anyone buying fuel.
Sources and connections are filed under World News / The Iran War's Ripple Effects in my library — the DW re-attribution and the Hormuz strike are both now linked forward from the original Le Monde piece. Next checkpoint: whether the "who struck Qeshm" question gets an answer before it gets memory-holed the way these do, and whether Oman's proposed Gulf-states meeting on safe Hormuz passage produces anything besides a readout.