The geopolitical aspects of Bab-al-Mandab extends way beyond any narrow view, both historically and contemporarily. So, before the next “maritime security initiative” arrives, ask the 4 main questions the brochure never answers
Part I ended in 1993 with Ethiopia landlocked and a grievance planted in its politics. This part runs from that moment to the last few weeks. The short version: every outside power has discovered that the Red Sea can be rented but not owned, and the people who live around it are paying the deposit.
The landlocked giant, and three prime ministers
Assab was Ethiopia’s main trade outlet before a war with Eritrea between 1998 and 2000, but since then, Addis Ababa has relied on Djibouti for the bulk of its international trade. The war started in Badme in May 1998 and ended with the Algiers Agreement of December 2000, but a CSIS assessment gives credit Lasting chill on regional security from Meles Zenawi’s refusal to accept border ruling. Meles, meanwhile, sold himself as the West’s indispensable partner against extremism and lent Ethiopian airstrips to American drones.
He died in August 2012. Hailemariam Desalegn, a southerner from a small ethnic group, inherited a coalition of powerful rivals and resigned in February 2018 amid the Oromia and Amhara protests, the first resignation in modern Ethiopian history.
On 2 April 2018 Abiy Ahmed, a former radio operator in the Badme war, took over. Within months he accepted the border ruling, and Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace declaration.
The Nobel Peace Prize followed, so did the troubles.
The cross-cost storm and the base bazaar
After the Saudi-Emirati intervention in Yemen in March 2015 (Operation Decisive Storm), there have been Sudanese deployments. These consisted of a force commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan but made up largely by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which trace their ancestry to the Janjaweed.
The Janjaweed, formed during the Chad-Libyan wars of the 1980s, when Sudan supported the Arab nomads revolt against the two countries, due to droughts, famine, in addition to related local disputes over grazing land and water between competing non-Arab farmers and Arab nomadic herders. To later on, become notorious in Darfur following the year 2003.
In 2013 Bashir remodelled one group of the militia led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “Hemedti”, which dragged them into the center of Sudanese politics, which eventually exploded their existence and influence, from the Chad, Libya and Central Africa borders and the supply lines that originate from there, to a later on further eastward movement, now expanded to the other shore of the Red Sea.
There is no clearer hint that everything connects across both shores of the gate of grief.
Meanwhile, the other coast became a rental market. Djibouti hosts American, French, Japanese, Italian and, since 2017, Chinese forces. Camp Lemonnier has held the US Africa Command’s Horn task force since 2002 and is America’s only permanent base on the continent, with well over 4,000 personnel by most counts. China’s base sits beside the Doraleh terminal, and by published estimates its personnel are a fraction of the American ones, which has not stopped much Western commentary from treating it as the one base that needs explaining. Djibouti’s relations with the UAE, meanwhile, soured after Djibouti refused to let the Emiratis build one.
The Emirates found another location: DP World has a 30-year lease on Berbera in Somaliland, and the UAE is clearly present in Bosaso in Puntland. Turkey controls the TURKSOM military training camp in Mogadishu, has a defence and naval agreement with Somalia, and, along with Qatar, had plans for an SUakin in Sudan.
Russia’s 25-year project to establish a naval base at Port Sudan with 300 troops and four ships was initially signed in 2020 and re-offered by al-Burhan in December 2025; according to Moscow’s ambassador, the war has put a stop to it.
For its part, Sudan withdrew from the $6 billion Emirati port project due to alleged military aid to the RSF, which the UAE maintains are only of civilian and humanitarian nature
Aside from the inconvenience of mutual accusations and official denials, the lesson is even more inconvenient for every propagandist: no single hegemon controls this coast. It is a bazaar, and every merchant vies for a good bargain.
Abiy, the sea, and the fuse
The Tigray war of 2020 to the Pretoria Agreement of November 2022, saw Eritrean forces fight alongside Ethiopian ones. Almost immediately, the two allies fell out. Abiy began arguing that a country of 150 million cannot live in a “geographic prison.” Eritrea heard a claim on Assab and mobilized in 2025; in October 2025 Ethiopia’s foreign minister accused Asmara, in a letter to the UN Secretary-General, of preparing for war.
In January 2024 Ethiopia signed a memorandum for access to Berbera in exchange for eventual recognition. Mogadishu was furious and moved closer to Eritrea and Egypt. Turkey has brokered a peace deal between Ethiopia and Somalia, but the promise of recognition still hangs in the air.
Analysts at the Soufan Center say Saudi Arabia and Egypt have backed Eritrea and by extension the TPLF to contain Ethiopia’s ambitions, a claim worth watching but not yet fully documented in public sources.
Israel returns to the Red Sea
Somaliland was officially recognized by Israel on 26 December 2025 becoming the first nation to do so in spite of the deterioration of Israeli-Eritrean relations according to the Washington Institute. This move received harsh criticism from the African Union, the EU, the GCC, Russia, China, Iran, and a united stand of twenty-one nations among which Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Sudan. The Somali president condemned the act as illegal and a boost to Al-Shabab*.
Pro-Israel analysts are openly discussing using Berbera’s airfield against the Houthis, and Somaliland’s president has offered bases there to Israel and the United States in exchange for broader recognition. What is not in doubt is the pattern: from Haile Selassie’s 1960s alliance to Hargeisa today, Israel has looked to the Horn’s periphery to secure the sea beyond Eilat.
Sudan and Somalia: the western and southern shores burn
Sudan’s war, which has been ongoing for four years, has transformed into a drone war in fragments. The army took control of Khartoum in 2025, while the RSF conquered El Fasher. The war front has shifted to Kordofan and Blue Nile, where Kurmuk, a border town, has been exchanging hands. It is alleged that Turkish and Iranian drones supply the army and Emirati supplies the RSF, according to leaked UN reports, that the UAE vehemently denies.
Russia, which CNN reported was supplying the RSF in 2023, later tilted toward the army. Reports that Ethiopia hosts RSF training camps come mainly from an anonymous former officer cited by Mada Masr and remain unverified.
Somalia is no better. Al-Shabaab’s* 2025 offensive recaptured much ground; the president’s and parliament’s mandates have expired; and the opposition warns that Turkey’s open support for the president risks deepening a constitutional crisis. Puntland withdrew recognition from Mogadishu in 2024.
Every foreign capital that says it wants Somalia unified is also courting one of its pieces.
2026: Hormuz shuts and the Houthis take the coast
Another reminder that everything connects, occurred in December 2025, when the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council swept across most of former South Yemen. The Saudi strikes at Mukalla Port on 30 December reversed it; by 9 January the STC had dissolved and the UAE had withdrawn.
The anti-Houthi coalition was in pieces just as the region’s largest war in decades arrived: US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February, followed by Iran’s closure of Hormuz.
Saudi Arabia responded by rerouting crude through Yanbu on the Red Sea, raising shipments from roughly one million to 4.9 million barrels a day. The Houthis, who joined the war in early April with strikes on Israel, resumed attacks on Saudi-linked shipping in July, then hit the East-West pipeline in September.
On 10 and 11 September they took Mokha, Perim, the Hanish islands and the rest of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
Reporting cited by Modern Diplomacy counts more than 112,000 people displaced by the renewed fighting across Yemen. The Houthis have told American officials that restrictions apply only to Saudi-linked vessels.
Treat “full control” of the strait with caution, as one analyst told NBC. The 1973 blockade required two shores acting together. The Houthis hold one; the other belongs to Djibouti and Eritrea, neither of which is anybody’s proxy.
Reports on Hormuz itself conflict: one holds that it reopened under a June US-Iran memorandum, while Al Jazeera on 18 September describes six months of restricted traffic.
Tigray, again
On 23 September, Tigrayan forces seized the airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire, and the TPLF’s deputy leader declared a “full-blown war.” TPLF spokesman Michael Asgedom told AP that the Pretoria accord was “no longer valid” and that the movement was cooperating with former enemies. Addis Ababa accuses Eritrea of financing them; Asmara denies it. Ethiopian Airlines has suspended flights to the region, and the African Union has urged neighbours not to inflame it.
Assab sits underneath all of it. The port that Italy’s shipping company bought in 1869, that the Ethiopian empire built a naval station on, and that Eritrea holds as the fruit of thirty years of war, is now the flashpoint of a possible interstate war.
The Suez bill
Egypt has paid for all of this. Income from the Suez Canal declined from $9.4 billion in 2022/23 to $7.2 billion in 2023/24, and President Sisi claimed in May 2026 that the instability in Bab al-Mandab region had caused losses of $10 billion to Egypt.
The irony lay in the fact that income in the second quarter of 2026 increased by 13% to $1.26 billion as tankers moved to Suez from Hormuz.
Container traffic remains down by around four-fifths. Egypt’s revenue is recovering on the back of an energy crisis, not restored confidence, nor stability at neither Hormuz nor Bab-al-Mandab.
The fuse reaches the Afar road
The Tigray war has moved from the highlands toward the coast. Tigrayan forces have taken Erebti in Afar, pushing toward the corridor that carries roughly 95% of Ethiopia’s trade to Djibouti, and some 150,000 people have fled the region.
That road runs barely 100 km from Perim, now held by the Houthis, so the two shores of the strait share one logistical nerve.
Eritrea, Abiy’s wartime partner of 2020 to 2022, now stands accused by Addis Ababa and the Afar regional governor of backing the rebels. Asmara has cut diplomatic ties after Ethiopia closed its embassy, and Ethiopia also blames Sudan and Egypt, who both deny it.
These remain accusations, not documented facts. A seven-group “Coalition for Survival,” including the TPLF, Fano and BPLM, has formed against the federal government, while the Tigrayan side itself is split, with a pro-government “Tigray Peace Force” fighting beside federal troops, who retook Alamata on 28 September.
On 5 October, sworn in for a new five-year term, Abiy told Ethiopians that access to the sea is vital to their “civilisation” and must come through “give and take.” The same day, Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia met at New Alamein and declared that Red Sea governance belongs to coastal states alone, a message aimed squarely at a landlocked Ethiopia.
Somalia’s president offered a narrow opening, saying access through Somali territory is possible but only by formal negotiation.
Four questions before closure
Every power since Aksum has learned that the strait can be rented but not owned. The current crop of protectors is diverse but strikingly consistent in its accounting. Israel, the United States, the Emirates, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and China each hold pieces of this coast, each with a story about stability.
There is the displaced Yemeni family on the Tihamah plain. There is the Sudanese civilian caught between two armies and their foreign suppliers. There is the Somali politician bargaining with pieces of his own country. There are the Ethiopian and Eritrean conscripts in the shadow of Assab. Not one of them was consulted about the “security architecture” that bears their country’s name.
The gate is called grief for a reason. The people who pass through it in the newsreels are usually somebody else’s cargo, while the ones who stay on the shore, Zaydi highlanders, Afar herders and Tigrayan farmers, have been paying the toll since Kaleb’s galleys.
But the geopolitical aspects of Bab-al-Mandab as I have shown, extends way beyond any narrow view, both historically and contemporarily.
So, before the next “maritime security initiative” arrives, ask the 4 main questions the brochure never answers: security for whom?, who benefits?, who was asked to cooperate?, and on whose expense?
While this two-part brief comes to a close, the saga of grief continues …
*- terrorist organisations, banned in Russia.
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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