Mayyun Island airbase in Bab al-Mandeb

by Jolyon: News

A runway roughly 1.85 km long, built to take attack, surveillance and transport aircraft, sits on Mayyun Island. That's the Yemeni island Ansarallah took earlier this month. Al-Masirah previewed footage of its journalists heading into the airbase there. And the location is the thing: Mayyun sits in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint that global shipping depends on. Who built the base? Construction got tied to the UAE. The Saudi-led coalition then came back and said the facility fell under coalition control. It doesn't take much for a place most people couldn't point to on a map to end up mattering to an entire region.