Yemeni Missile Strikes U.S. Cargo Ship after U.S. Bombs Yemen a Second Time

News Analysis

The owner of the ship, Eagle Shipping International, LLC, claimed that it was not damaged and no crew were injured. 

After negotiations in the UN Security Council on January 10 over what to do about Yemen's blockade against ships linked to fascist Israel resulted in passage of a U.S.-drafted resolution authorizing defending those ships, the United States and its Operation Prosperity Guardian allies decided they now had carte blanche rights to launch intense air strikes on one of the smallest and poorest nations of the world.

They would do so with the goal, Team-Biden and the other politicians said, of minimizing civilian casualties. This is despite that, up until the time of that resolution, Yemen had not killed a single person in any of their aerial warning attacks.

Yemen's purpose was to impose a blockade on ships linked to Israel until there is a permanent and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza, with no interest in causing deaths in the process. The U.S. purpose is to punish Yemen on behalf of Israel in support of the genocide and to demonstrate that it is the dominant military force in the region. 

Late on January 11 and into the early hours of January 12, the U.S.-led strike force, which also included some U.K. Typhoon aircraft, attacked multiple targets across Houthi territory in Yemen in a first assault. According to the coalition forces, that first strike reportedly hit 60 separate targets in Yemen in a single night.

Yahya Sarea, a Houthi spokesperson, said after the attacks that his government had identified 73 separate raids carried out in that first wave of attacks.

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a senior member of the Houthi governing council, denounced the attacks as “barbaric”.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense at the time declared that “early indications are that the Houthis’ ability to threaten merchant shipping has taken a blow.”

The Defense Ministry also went on to remind everyone that “particular care was taken to minimize any risks to civilians” in the attacks.

The next day the Operation Prosperity Guardian forces attacked Yemen again, apparently deciding that the 60 to 73 attacks the first night had not created enough of “a blow” against the courageous people of Yemen.

According to CENTCOM, the U.S. Defense Department’s Central Command for all Middle East activities, the second group of attacks, launched in the early hours of January 13, had the U.S. Navy’s USS Carney launching Tomahawk missiles at an important Yemeni ground-based radar installation.

CENTCOM confirmed multiple other air strikes had taken place against targets on that second day as well.

In both waves of U.S.-led air strikes on Yemen, the U.S. government asked and secured permission from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to fly their attack missions utilizing air space controlled by both countries.

The U.S. military said its attacks did successfully reach an estimated 93% of all targets. But as the smoke cleared afterwards and a combination of satellite and other high-altitude reconnaissance missions were carried out, it became clear the U.S. had done far less damage to Yemen's capabilities than they expected.

Based on classified intel gathered after the attacks, a senior Pentagon official who was not identified said that, “some degradation but we expect a response and don’t believe we have set back their military efforts substantially.” 

That is consistent with a parallel statement released by Yemen's Deputy Information Secretary Nasreddin Amer, that the second set of attacks by U.S.-led forces were even less effective than the first.

“There were no injuries, no material nor human losses,” he said in a press interview. He also said Yemen would react soon with a “strong and effective response” to the latest U.S.-led actions.

Yemen leaders already said that after the first night of coalition bombings on their country they would consider all United States and United Kingdom targets as fair game for counterattacks.

On January 15, the first example of what that strategy might mean became apparent. That is when Yemen launched and landed an anti-ship ballistic missile on a U.S.-owned cargo ship in transit off the Yemeni coast.

That ship, the Gibraltar Eagle, was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands but like most carriers was owned by someone else. In this case, the ship is owned by the Stamford, Connecticut-based Eagle Bulk Shipping (Eagle Shipping Intl., LLC). It had departed on December 19, 2023, from South Korea, and reportedly was carrying a shipment of coal.

It was heading towards the Suez Canal when the missile struck the ship. The missile hit the vessel’s cargo hold but reportedly did not do much damage. The ship is reportedly now moving ahead through the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal. Its destination is unclear currently, but the original manifest had it tracking to make its next port stop on January 20, 2024. With that being just five days ahead of when it was struck, the ship could be stopping somewhere along the Mediterranean Sea, including in Israel to supply Israel's Orot Rabin Power Plant, a massively polluting coal fired power plant. 

As America's unjustified war on Yemen intensifies, it is important to remember that the conflict between the U.S. and Houthis goes back far more than just over the last few months of shipping disruptions. 

It has in fact been ongoing for almost ten years, ever since the Houthi rebels began their civil war of independence against what they regarded as the oppressive authoritarian regime of the corrupt regime run by Saudi Arabia. In 2014, after many years of attempting to push back against the government on human rights grounds, Houthi rebels took control of the country’s capital city of Sanaa. That escalated into a broader conflict when in March 2015 the Supreme Revolutionary Committee of the Houthis ordered a nationwide mobilization of their forces. Within weeks, the Houthi rebels had taken control of Lahij and amassed their troops at the borders of the city of Aden. Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, then-president of the occupation government of the country, was based in Aden at the time but cowardly fled the country as the Houthi forces came near.

Though this was clearly an internal conflict, that did not stop other nations of the world from stepping in to put down the liberation movement. That led to the formation of a foreign invasion force put together to push back the Houthis and allow the occupation to retake lands the Houthis had reclaimed. 

That foreign invasion force was led by Saudi Arabia and initially included eight other pro-Hadi Arab-aligned nations supporting them: United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. It soon expanded beyond that to include the U.S., U.K., and France via the supply of weapons, aircraft, and other munitions to the Saudi-led group, and other unidentified support which is believed to have included training and possibly flying of missions against the Houthis under cover of the Saudis. 

With the Saudis came the terrorist forces of Al Qaeda and ISIS, managed by the CIA and Israel's Mossad. 

The war has so far killed close to 400,000 with some 70% of those children under the age of 5. 

In September 2019, a United Nations report accused the United Kingdom, United States, and France of complicity in war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition supporting the official government of Yemen, by arming and supporting the vicious attacks led by the Saudis against Houthi forces. According to the experts who compiled the report based on exhaustive research, the Saudi Arabia government allowed widespread killing and injuries of the Houthis despite the many civilian casualties which were involved. The Saudis also embraced starvation of civilians as one of many legitimate tactics it used to achieve its goals. That is specifically identified as genocide and an international war crime on its own, not counting any of the other atrocities committed against the Yemenis during the war.

The panel investigating the war crimes did contact the Saudis for comment. The panel said the Saudi response was “particularly worrying [since] it implies that an attack hitting a military target is legal, notwithstanding civilian casualties, hence ignoring the principle of proportionality”.

The panel report was released soon after a particularly shocking raid by the Saudi coalition on a prison complex in southwest Yemen on September 1. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said many tens of people were killed in just that one attack who were not involved in the military battles in any way. The Saudis also targeted school buses, schools and hospitals. 

Of note is that the Saudi logic, that civilians were legitimate targets if killing them helped achieve the larger goal of winning the war, is one of the same arguments same Israel forces are using for carrying out their genocide in Gaza.

The Yemen civil war is still ongoing to this day, though it has been on hold with a ceasefire now for some months under a peace deal brokered by China. The independence forces control most of the country but there is still a small amount of territory controlled by Saudi Arabia and UAE with a puppet government led by a Presidential Leadership Council. The last President of the occupation government, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, resigned in 2022 and has not been replaced. 

In private comments made since the latest round of attacks on Yemen were carried out this weekend, senior officials with the Department of Defense said they believed it would be difficult to cause long-term major damage to the Yemen's ability to strike back in the Red Sea for now, because most of the missiles the freedom fighters have in their possession are stored underground.

All evidence points to the conflict with Yemen growing over the next few days.

On the U.S. side, Pentagon officials have already publicly questioned the effectiveness of their current campaign against Yemen. They claim that despite having struck what are easily over one hundred carefully selected military targets and having done so using precise intel gathered associated with their collaboration with the Saudis during the Yemeni civil war, they believe the Houthis have retained at least three-quarters of their capability to attack vessels in the Red Sea. This could mean the U.S. is actively considering more intense attacks against Yemen, possibly using weaponry which would have a better chance of penetrating the underground locations where missiles and drones are stored.

Another tactic the U.S. has been working in parallel is to engage other locations from which to launch its attacks on Yemen. That has proven less successful than the U.S. had expected, as demonstrated by what happened in negotiations with the country of Djibouti recently.

Located on the Horn of Africa and directly across from Houthi-controlled Yemen at the gates of the Red Sea, Djibouti is strategically positioned as a place from which the U.S. would have liked to run air strikes against Yemen. Its military contacted Djibouti officials through private backchannels to do that. Djibouti agreed to allow the U.S. to base anti-missile defense systems in their country for the purposes of protecting American naval vessels and cargo ships. But it refused outright to allow the U.S. to fly missions across the waters from Djibouti into Yemen.

It also appears the U.S. was denied similar requests to base military forces and missile launching sites intended for use against Yemen in Saudi Arabia, or in Qatar, despite that it had received approval from both countries to fly aircraft through their airspace on the way to their Yemeni targets.

More will be learned about the U.S. strategy over the next several days, as most experts do not believe the first two waves of attacks on Yemen will be the last, especially after the hit on the U.S-owned Gibraltar Eagle cargo ship yesterday.

Yemen is also expected to carry out further actions on ships connected to Israel, the U.S. and UK in coming. But, those actions are unlikely to inflict much damage. 

Also being watched closely is what all parties in these conflicts will do once the International Court of Justice in the Hague rules on South Africa’s charges against fascist Israel of having committed genocide in its mass murders in Gaza. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having already announced his country’s intent to ignore whatever the ICJ says and continue with its killings until he believes his job is done there, a decision by the ICJ against Israel could at least discourage Israel's minions from continuing to support what would be legally recognized as genocide and a crimes against humanity. 

The White House is run by Zionist Jews subservient to Netanyahu and see Iran as being the driving force behind Yemen. It appears from Israel's insane actions that one of its goals is to provoke Iran into open warfare so that it can justify using nuclear weapons against Iran before it acquires its own nukes. So, it is likely to continue to wage war against Yemen through Team-Biden and may stage a false flag attack against American forces and blame it on Iran if necessary. 

The Yemenis are resilient, determined and battle-hardened. Their fight for freedom could not be defeated before by corrupt Arab dictatorships and American and British military might. And because their cause for Palestinians is righteous, they are unlikely to be defeated in the future and they will continue to inspire all of humanity to rise up against the forces of darkness.