At least seven oil tankers made sharp U-turns off Yemen this week. Each was heading to or from a Saudi port, and each reversed course after Yemen's Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. With that, the war reached the one part of the region's shipping map that was still open.
For Türkiye, it closes a circle. The Strait of Hormuz, where much of its energy comes from, is already choked. Now the Red Sea, where much of its trade goes, is choking too.
The Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, announced the blockade on Monday and began enforcing it within days. Their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said they hit two Saudi oil tankers, the ENCELA and the LAYLIA, with drones and missiles for "violating the blockade." Ship-tracking data reported by the BBC showed at least seven tankers changing course near Yemen, two of them carrying a combined 2.8 million barrels of Saudi crude that had set out from the western port of Yanbu and then turned back.
The timing is the point. Saudi Arabia had been sending more of its oil out through the Red Sea precisely because the war with Iran had made the Strait of Hormuz, its usual Gulf route, too dangerous to rely on. So the crude that fled one chokepoint has run straight into another. The same war now presses on both ends of the Middle East's sea trade at once.
Those two ends carry a large share of the world's commerce. Nearly 15 percent of global seaborne trade moves through the Red Sea, which funnels into two narrow gates, the Suez Canal at its northern mouth and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a gap of about 30 kilometers, at its southern one. Energy analysts warn that a sustained closure of Bab al-Mandeb, on top of the disruption at Hormuz, would put a striking share of the world's seaborne oil at risk at the same moment. Crude has already pushed past $100 a barrel, its first time above that line since May.
Türkiye feels this from both directions, which is what makes it different from most of the countries watching. It imports almost all the oil and gas it burns, so a higher world price lands straight on its energy bill, the exposure that our earlier reporting traced through the Iranian gas line and the Gulf. But it is also a trading economy that lives on what it ships out, and a great deal of that moves through Suez and the Red Sea toward the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa.
When the Red Sea is unsafe, that cargo does not stop. It goes the long way, around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa, which adds roughly 10 to 14 days to a voyage and, by shippers' estimates, pushes freight rates up 25 to 35 percent. Türkiye has seen this film before. The Red Sea crisis that began in late 2023 already lengthened routes and raised costs for Turkish exporters, and a firmer blockade would deepen the same wound. A container that once reached the Gulf in weeks now takes longer and costs more, and the exporter, or the buyer, pays the difference.
Ankara has come down hard against the blockade, and its own exposure explains why. On 22 July the Foreign Ministry said it condemned the Houthi threats against Saudi Arabia and reaffirmed its solidarity with the kingdom, and it called for an immediate halt to "actions and threats that endanger maritime security and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait." A country that needs both straits open is not going to welcome anyone closing one.
It was not alone. Germany's chancellor, Friedrich Merz, called any naval blockade "unacceptable," and the United Nations envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, said he was "alarmed," warning that the attacks risk dragging the country back into full-scale war.
For now the ships keep moving, just not where they used to and not at the old price. Türkiye sits between the two straits that the war has narrowed, buying its energy through one and selling its goods through the other, and watching the cost of both climb on the same set of headlines.