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.[1]
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.[1][2][3][4]
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.”[5]
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.[6]
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.[7] 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.”[8]