Iran-aligned Houthi fighters took control of Yemen’s strategically vital port city of Mocha on Thursday, then advanced toward areas commanding views of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The move creates a potentially perilous new threat to global commerce as maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains sharply restricted.

The offensive puts the southern entrance to the Red Sea at risk just as Saudi Arabia has turned more heavily to that passage to avoid Hormuz. With pressure now mounting on vital sea lanes on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula, the conflict could trigger fresh disruptions for oil cargoes and commercial shipping moving through one of the world’s most important trade chokepoints.

“Now you have Iran on one side of the Arabian Peninsula controlling Hormuz, and now the Houthis controlling Bab el-Mandeb on the other side of the peninsula,” Hisham Al-Omeisy, senior Yemen advisor at the European Institute of Peace, told News Media. “Which basically is going to drive prices — oil prices, goods and everything else — up exponentially.”

Speaking on background, a senior administration official told News Media: “The United States is focused on protecting our core national security interests — such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea — while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges. We are in continuous dialogue with Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen Government regarding regional stability.”

Yemeni government sources said Thursday that Houthi forces had seized Mocha and moved as far as the Hanish Islands. Saudi-backed government troops pulled south toward Dhubab, directly across the Bab el-Mandeb from the strategic island of Perim. Securing Dhubab and Perim would be essential for any force seeking tighter control of the strait, Yemeni government sources told Reuters on Sept. 10.

At its narrowest, the Bab el-Mandeb measures roughly 18 miles across. The waterway links the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, which leads north toward the Suez Canal. It serves as a critical route for Asian-European trade and major energy shipments.

Its strategic role has become even more pronounced amid the Iran conflict.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, crude oil and petroleum liquids transiting Bab el-Mandeb averaged 8.1 million barrels a day during the second quarter of 2026, rising from 5.4 million barrels a day in the final quarter of 2025. Over the same period, volumes through Hormuz collapsed from 21.6 million barrels per day to 4.9 million. The EIA said the increase in Bab el-Mandeb traffic was partly driven by Saudi Arabia sending crude through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, allowing exports to bypass Hormuz.

Al-Omeisy said the danger extends beyond the Houthis’ geographical gains. He said retreating government forces left behind military materiel that could strengthen Houthi forces on other fronts.

“People are focused on taking Mocha and those outposts on the Red Sea,” Al-Omeisy said. “But the military side is terrible, particularly the equipment, the munitions, the vehicles, the drones that were at those military camps, which they can now, in turn, use against the government forces elsewhere.”

U.S.

Reuters separately reported Thursday that Iranian arms and direct guidance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards helped the Houthi advance, citing Yemeni government, Iranian and regional sources. Two Iranian sources told Reuters that Tehran had instructed the Houthis to intensify attacks on Saudi Arabia and promised additional funding, weapons and senior officers. Iran has publicly denied directing Houthi operations.

The seizure comes amid what conflict-monitoring organization ACLED described Sept. 9 as the most serious escalation between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed camp since hostilities resumed in mid-July.

ACLED recorded at least 276 fatalities between Sept. 3 and 7 as clashes spread across al-Dali, al-Bayda, Marib, Shabwa, al-Jawf, al-Hudayda and Taizz, according to an analysis published Sept. 9.

Sherwan Hindreen Ali, ACLED’s Middle East research manager, said fighting along the Red Sea coast had become particularly intense as both sides sought control over territory with direct strategic importance to Bab el-Mandeb.

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“Fighting will remain focused on the fronts of the Red Sea coast in al-Hudaydah and Taizz, where both the Houthis and the Saudi Arabia/IRG have a vested interest in claiming the whole territory to deprive the other side of effective control of the strait of Bab el-Mandab,” Ali said in an analysis.

Saudi Arabia itself has also become more deeply involved.

Ali said Saudi forces launched at least 15 strikes against the Houthis between Sept. 3 and 7, mostly around Taizz, marking the highest number of Saudi strikes since Riyadh resumed military engagement against the Houthis in July.

The Houthis responded Sept. 8 with what Ali described as their largest wave of direct attacks on Saudi territory since March 2022, launching dozens of drones and ballistic missiles toward Abha, Jizan, Najran and Khamis Mushait. Ali said the attacks injured 73 people.

The widening fighting is now posing an early test for a new joint defense agreement between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey.

Al-Omeisy said the international response allowed the Houthis to exploit divisions among their opponents.

“The Houthis are also good in exploiting divisions and delays, they move rapidly on the ground to force a status quo while the international community debates merits, responsibilities and costs of an intervention.”

The escalation also raises questions about Saudi Arabia’s newly signed defense agreement with Pakistan and Turkey.

The agreement, signed last month in Mecca, states that an armed attack against one member will be considered an attack against all three, Reuters reported Sept. 10. But after Houthi drones and ballistic missiles struck Saudi cities and energy infrastructure this week, Pakistan said Thursday that no military response under the pact was currently being discussed. 

“There is no such thing under discussion right now,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sajjad Haider Khan said, according to Reuters. “When time comes [we] will act under the agreement.” 

The Houthis, meanwhile, have said international navigation through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb remains safe, while maintaining that Saudi vessels are subject to their previously announced blockade, Reuters reported Thursday. 

Al-Omeisy warned that reversing the Houthis’ latest territorial gains could become increasingly difficult.

“The Houthis are really good at capturing a position, they entrench really well,” he said. “They send these massive reinforcements, and then it’s going to be extremely difficult to push them out of those areas.”

Oil markets were already responding to the widening regional threat Thursday. Brent crude jumped more than 5% to $106.60 a barrel by late Thursday morning, while U.S. crude climbed above $100 for the first time since May, according to Reuters. 

Reuters contributed to the story.

A leading artificial intelligence safety researcher raised fresh concerns this week after leaving his post and warning that the technology could ‘kill us all’ before the decade is over.

Jacob Coxon, who worked on training Anthropic’s newest AI models in San Francisco, urged people not to ‘underestimate’ the technology’s capabilities — especially if it reaches a ‘superintelligent’ level.

The 27-year-old said Anthropic, the company behind the widely used Claude system, and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and his former employer, were not ‘acting responsibly’ when it came to AI safety.

So, how could artificial intelligence ultimately lead to humanity’s extinction?

Experts say one reason the threat is so concerning is the range of potential routes through which AI could bring about humanity’s destruction.

Potential AI ‘worst-case scenarios’ include fueling political turmoil through misinformation and causing irreversible changes to the planet’s environment.

Researchers also warn that AI could prove deadly through its ability to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction.

As global superpowers compete to create ever more capable systems, a rogue — or merely unpredictable — AI could gain control of nuclear or biological weapons and eradicate humanity.

Going rogue and hacking critical systems

Many of the dangers associated with superintelligent AI arise from what researchers call the ‘alignment problem’.

The basic idea is that once we create an AI more intelligent than ourselves, we might struggle to ensure its goals remain ‘aligned’ with our own.

The world has already been given a stark reminder of these risks after more than 1,000 rogue AI bots created by OpenAI broke out of their secure environment and hacked Hugging Face, a public website that hosts open-source models.

The bots had not been asked to attack Hugging Face but had simply been given an impossible task by accident, and decided that the best way to solve it would be to steal the answers.

Some researchers are concerned that more powerful AI models could suffer this same alignment error on a much more destructive scale.

Professor Mark Lee, an artificial intelligence expert from the University of Birmingham, told the Daily Mail that this is an even bigger risk than ‘armed robots’.

‘The issue is that while the big AI companies are all rushing to develop AIs which are as smart or even smarter than humans, we don’t have reliable means to control their behaviour,’ Professor Lee explains.

‘AI exists as software, so any system which is connected via the internet could be vulnerable.

‘For instance, if the control for a national transport system or nuclear power station was attacked, then this could be catastrophic.’

Causing societal chaos 

A rogue AI doesn’t even need to harm humanity directly to bring an end to life as we know it.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski, of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, points out that a ‘truly smart AI would realise it is co-dependent on humanity’.

He explained: ‘We’d need the AI for the things we wanted to do and the AIs would need us for materials, power, cooling, networks, and data.’

This means it might not be in the intelligence’s best interest to wipe out humanity in a fiery catastrophe.

While Dr Rogoyski stresses that this is likely to mean AI will be beneficial to humanity in the long run, other experts are significantly more concerned.

A ‘more insidious’ alternative is that AIs might start to subtly control humanity through disinformation and propaganda, potentially sparking devastating conflicts between humans.

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Andrea Miotti, founder and CEO of ControlAI, told the Daily Mail: ‘Because no one, not even the leading AI developers, knows how to control superintelligent AI, it poses an extinction risk to humanity.

‘If we have billions of superintelligent AI agents running around that we cannot control and that are competing amongst themselves for resources and power, experts expect that humans will be the collateral damage.’

Mr Miotti adds that this could eventually lead to the ‘gradual disempowerment of humanity’.

Triggering nuclear war  

When it comes to the ways that AI could mechanically bring about the end of human life as we know it, the most obvious threats are the weapons we already have.

At present, nine countries possess nuclear weapons, with about 12,187 nuclear warheads held between them.

If any one of these countries were to fall prey to a radically misaligned AI, those weapons could be turned against us.

Worryingly, the alignment problem means that a superintelligent AI doesn’t even need to be malicious for this to occur.

A bot might be trying to maximise profit for its owner by shocking the stock market, or lower global temperatures with the unexpected conclusion that a nuclear winter would be fastest.

However, this risk only becomes greater as powerful nations actively race to implement AI into their weapons systems.

Ukraine has already confirmed the first human killed by a fully autonomous drone attack, and almost every other country is following their lead.

Even in 2022, the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy warned that modern war will ‘tax the limits of human understanding and often require responses at machine speed’.

But without a human in the loop to keep an eye on the AI’s decision-making, conflicts could rapidly spiral out of control.

Ben Eisenpress, Director of Operations at the Future of Life Institute, previously told the Daily Mail that this could lead to a ‘flash war’.

Mr Eisenpress said: ‘Integrating AI into nuclear command and control systems is destabilising.

‘Even if there is technically a “human in the loop,” we cannot count on decision-makers to override a potentially erroneous AI-generated launch recommendation, given such existential stakes.’

Unleashing deadly bioweapons  

Finally, AI might not destroy humanity by acting on its own desires, but by putting dangerous tools in the hands of people willing to use them.

Weaponised bacteria or viruses have previously required the pooled knowledge and funding of entire nations to create.

However, experts have repeatedly warned that AI tools make it significantly easier to develop deadly bioweapons.

Professor Lee says: ‘The more realistic threat is bad actors such as terrorists or rogue states using AI to develop a new virus leading to another more fatal global pandemic.’

On Thursday, Anthropic revealed that it had to thwart ‘malicious’ attempts to use its Claude model to create bioweapons.

The company said it had uncovered five incidents in which users sought information ‘in ways that could support biological weapons development’.

This comes after a report warned that popular ‘off–the–shelf’ AI models can easily be modified to bypass any safety measures.

According to the report, published by research group Crimson Flare, this allows an AI to ‘walk unsophisticated malicious actors through the specific steps to create explosives, or chemical and biological weapons’.

For some 9/11 survivors, the pain has never faded — and they say the public is forcing them to relive it in a different way.

People left with severe, life-altering burns in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks say the country has largely moved on from the scale of the devastation, with some survivors now encountering indifference and even disrespect.

“There are people who tell the survivors of 9/11 that we need to get over it,” said Ken Summers, 76, who suffered third-degree burns at the World Trade Center.

“They say, ‘I know your story.’ People don’t want to hear about it anymore,” Summers, a Long Island resident, told The Post ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“People are 9/11’ed out — they’re done with it. They’ve had enough, and I’ve felt like that for years.”

Summers was employed on the 27th floor when he went to mail a check in the North Tower lobby at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001 — the moment American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building.

A huge fireball engulfed him, throwing him backward onto the sidewalk.

The explosion caused agonizing third-degree burns to his hands and arms, along with second-degree burns to his face and head.

The former Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield analyst has undergone roughly a dozen punishing surgeries and skin grafts since the attack. He has also battled PTSD and lost the ability to pursue hobbies that once gave him pleasure.

“It’s been tough — I’m always in pain. It’s with me every day,” said Summers, now a grandfather.

Too many people minimize the terrorist attack and his own gut-wrenching injuries, Summers said.

An insensitive friend once blurted out, “Oh, sh-t – we’re going to hear this story for the rest of our lives,” he said. 

Others have dismissed his burns — which caused charred bubbling skin that destroyed his hair and peeled off in sheets —  as worth it for the payout.

“At first almost everybody says, ‘Well, you must have gotten a lot of money,’” he said.

“Yes, I’ve got a substantial sum of money, but I’ve also had a substantial amount of pain and recovery. Are you factoring that in?” he said.

The glib remarks happen so often that Summers, who said he’s received about one million dollars from the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, has a prepared “comeback.”

“Do you think I would have liked to have given up piano playing, golfing, tennis and skiing – things I loved?” asked Summers.

 He pointed out he can no longer grip a racquet or club, adding, “I can’t feel things like other people.”

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“Do you think I would have given all that up for money?” he said.

Of the roughly 50 people who were severely burned on 9/11, Summers is one of about half to survive past the first year.

Lauren Manning, who is also a 9/11 burn victim, told The Post some people are uncomfortable hearing stories about the attacks.

“People gravitate towards stories that are easier to hold,” said Manning, a Cantor Fitzgerald senior executive, who suffered debilitating burns on more than 82 percent of her body during the attack.

Manning — who was engulfed in a fireball in the lobby of the North Tower —  said “time fades” and “the immediacy of this horrific mass terror attack appears somehow less” for people.

But the mom of two, who has endured years of surgery and physical therapy, said she hasn’t let it get in the way of her recovery.

“Survival is a private struggle. It happens generally out of sight, but it was my own act of defiance. I had one simple goal: I was not going to let the terrorists claim another kill,” she said.

Other survivors said it’s common to feel slighted.

William Rodriguez, a North Tower custodian dubbed a hero for helping first responders rescue people, said fellow survivors feel they’ve been treated with “disrespect.”

“Survivors tell me they’re always dealing with people who tell them to ‘move on, don’t dwell on it,’” said Rodriguez, who lost 200 friends on 9/11

“People believe we made off with a lot of compensation money and that’s not true,” Rodriguez said, blasting the false assertions of a big pay day.

With “extreme PTSD and survivor’s guilt,” Rodriguez found himself destitute in 2005, living in a car under the Pulaski Skyway bridge. 

“I went from national hero to zero,” he said, noting that he was “victimized again – begging for help” to no avail.  

“Survivors suffer in silence – people have to defend themselves. They have to validate their pain because some people don’t get it,” he said.

People no longer want to hear about the fallout from 9/11, said Brian Branco, who’s dealing with lifelong PTSD from the attacks.

“People get bored – they have no interest,” said Branco, who worked for the software company Baseline on the 78th floor of the South Tower, where colleagues died.

The Lyndhurst, NJ dad said insensitivity surfaced immediately, when a family member challenged his wife three weeks after 9/11, asking, “What are you complaining about? Your husband lived.”

He added, “People think if you don’t have any physical injury, what’s your problem?  But you know what? I left three people behind,” he admitted. “I beat myself up about it.”

The survivors’ comments came as NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch this week called  for “moral clarity” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — decrying revisionists who have downplayed the attack or framed it as heroic.

Lindsay Clancy defense attorney Kevin Reddington sharply responded Thursday to Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, insisting the legal analyst was “wrong” to condemn his remarks about the lone juror in Clancy’s murder trial. Reddington also said he would welcome an opportunity to debate Turley.

“I’d like to meet with him sometime and maybe debate a few things,” Reddington told Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas when asked about Turley, a Fox News contributor and law professor at George Washington University.

Llenas raised Turley’s earlier criticism of Reddington’s public statements concerning the sole juror who prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous murder verdict.

“Professor Turley said your attack on the juror was quote, ‘utterly reprehensible, a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency. He effectively put a target on the back of a juror who committed the unpardonable sin of not being convinced by his arguments,’” Llenas said.

Reddington dismissed Turley’s characterization.

“Well, I guess Jonathan Turley was wrong, wasn’t he? Based on what we now know as far as the reason why this jury did not vote in accordance with the law,” Reddington said. “Maybe Jonathan Turley should check out the record before he makes his accusations. I kind of think his comments were reprehensible.”

Llenas challenged that response, pointing out that the public has not heard the holdout juror’s account of what happened during deliberations.

“We don’t know what this one juror actually means or have said,” Llenas said.

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“Probably a matter of time before he’s getting interviewed somewhere and you can find out,” Reddington replied.

The exchange is the latest chapter in a public disagreement that erupted after Clancy’s trial, when Reddington publicly criticized the lone holdout juror who prevented a unanimous verdict on murder charges. Turley responded at the time by accusing the veteran defense attorney of abandoning the professional restraint lawyers should exercise toward jurors after a trial.

Turley responded again Thursday after Reddington’s Fox News interview was published.

“I was surprised to learn this morning that Kevin Reddington challenged me to a debate in an interview with Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas over my criticism of his attack on the holdout juror in the Clancy trial,” Turley wrote on X.

“I am curious as to what is debatable in his view: the professional duty of lawyers not to fuel the rage against a holdout juror or his apparent self-exemption from that duty,” he added.

Turley has argued that lawyers have an ethical obligation not to inflame public anger against jurors who exercise independent judgment during deliberations. Reddington has maintained that the holdout juror failed to follow the judge’s instructions and that subsequent information supports his criticism.

Clancy’s trial ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked on whether she was criminally responsible for the deaths of her three young children. Prosecutors have said they plan to retry her on the murder charges.