[UPDATE] Houthis seize two more Red Sea islands as Saudi pipeline faces 3-to-5-week outage

Houthi rebels seized Greater and Lesser Hanish on Monday, Sept. 14, tightening their hold over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the narrow Red Sea entrance between the Indian Ocean and Suez) days after taking Mokha and Perim Island (Friday, Sept. 11). Repairs to Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline (the 1,200-km bypass moving Gulf crude to the Red Sea), hit Thursday, Sept. 10 in an attack Riyadh blamed on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, will take three to five weeks, per two regional officials. The islands. The Hanish group sits 160 km (100 miles) north of the strait, which carries roughly a tenth of global trade. Rebels deployed after hundreds of government-allied forces withdrew; council official Sultan Al-Aradah says those forces are regrouping and will return. The oil. The line can carry 7 million barrels a day; Riyadh had rerouted about 4 million barrels a day through it, about 4% of global supply. The Strait of Hormuz (the Gulf chokepoint for a fifth of traded oil and gas in peacetime) is moving a fraction of normal traffic — Al Jazeera put flows at 6 to 9 million barrels a day against about 20 million in peacetime. Yanbu holds five to seven days of stocks. Brent crude (the global oil benchmark) settled higher Monday, Sept. 14. The U.S. An appeal by Mohammed bin Salman (Crown Prince, Saudi Arabia) for U.S. airstrikes was declined, though Centcom (the U.S. command running forces in the Middle East) chief Adm. Brad Cooper met him in Jeddah. Donald Trump said the Houthis called, 'don't want to fight with us' and are 'letting most ships go through.' The toll. More than 82,000 people have been displaced in Yemen since Tuesday, Sept. 1, per the U.N. migration agency, and more than 2,000 Yemenis have fled to Djibouti. TIME puts deaths in the years-long civil war at 150,000. What next. The line stays mostly out of service for three to five weeks while withdrawn government-allied forces regroup to return to the battle.