The Bab el-Mandeb
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The Bab el-Mandeb is the strait where the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa come almost to a close, joining the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea. All shipping coming down through the Suez Canal must pass through it, which is why, in John Kiriakou's account, the Somali piracy of previous decades was concentrated there.

He gives its width inconsistently across tellings, nine miles or sixteen in one, about four in another where he contrasts it with the Strait of Hormuz, and sixteen miles between Somaliland and Yemen in a third. His comparative point is stable even where the figure is not: the Bab el-Mandeb is much narrower than Hormuz, and therefore easier to close.

The only interest

Kiriakou uses the strait to define the limits of legitimate American involvement in Yemen. Reflecting on a question he first asked in 1990, he says that even all these years later, "except for the security of the Bab el-Mandeb, we don't have national interests in Yemen." What the United States should be doing there instead, he argues, is digging water wells, helping build roads and hospitals and upgrading the electrical grid, "but that's never going to happen."

The Houthis and the chokepoint

The strait is what makes the Houthi movement a strategic actor rather than a local one. Kiriakou describes the Houthis, Shia, a minority in Yemen, close to and probably armed by Iran, as controlling not the country but the part of it that includes the capital, and as having expressed solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza by harassing shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb and firing on vessels including American military ones, which he calls a really stupid thing to do.

Somaliland

The Israeli response, in his account, surprised everyone: opening diplomatic relations with the breakaway republic of Somaliland, the only country in the world to recognise it. The exchange he describes is recognition for a military base, a base to be used against the Houthis, and thereby to keep the Bab el-Mandeb open. "That's the whole key. If you can beat up on the Houthis, then the Bab el-Mandeb remains open." Asked whether the base had been built, he said not yet. He has visited Somaliland himself, in 2009, and describes it as bordering Djibouti and Ethiopia, sitting just south of the Bab el-Mandeb and about twenty miles across the water from Yemen, "right in the heart of pirate central."

See also

- Yemen
- Houthis
- Somaliland
