ATHENS: On a warm spring night in Athens, shortly before midnight, a senior executive at a Greek shipping company noticed an unusual email had landed in his personal inbox.

The message, which was also sent to the manager’s business email address, warned that one of the company’s vessels travelling through the Red Sea was at risk of being attacked by Houthi fighters.

The Greek-managed ship had violated a Houthi-imposed transit ban by docking at an Israeli port and would be “directly targeted by the Yemeni Armed Forces in any area they deem appropriate,” said the message.

“You bear the responsibility and consequences of including the vessel in the ban list,” said the email, signed by the Yemen-based Humanitarian Operations Coordination Centre (HOCC), a body set up in February to liaise between Houthi forces and commercial shipping operators.

Greek-operated companies to end their journeys via Red Sea

At least two Greek-operated shipping companies that received email threats have decided to end such journeys via the Red Sea, two sources with direct knowledge said, declining to identify the companies for security reasons. An executive at a third shipping company, which has also received a letter, said they decided to end business with Israel in order to be able to continue to use the Red Sea route.

The email, received at the end of May, warned of “sanctions” for the entire company’s fleet if the vessel continued “to violate the ban criteria and enter the ports of the usurping Israeli entity”.

The warning message was the first of more than a dozen increasingly menacing emails sent to at least six Greek shipping companies since May amid rising geopolitical tension in the Middle East, according to six industry sources with direct knowledge of the emails and two with indirect knowledge.

Since last year, the Houthis have been firing missiles, sending armed drones and launching boats laden with explosives at commercial ships with ties to Israeli, US and UK entities.

The email campaign, which has not been previously reported, indicates that Houthi rebels are casting their net wider and targeting Greek merchant ships with little or no connection to Israel. The threats were also, for the first time in recent months, directed at entire fleets, increasing the risks for those vessels still trying to cross the Red Sea.

“Your ships breached the decision of Yemen Armed Forces,” read a separate email sent in June from a Yemeni government web domain to the first company weeks later and to another Greek shipping company. “Therefore, punishments will be imposed on all vessels of your company […] Best Regards, Yemen Navy.”

Yemen, which lies at the entrance to the Red Sea, has been embroiled in years of civil war. In 2014, the Houthis took control of the capital, Sanaa, and ousted the internationally recognised government. In January, the United States put the Houthis back on its list of terrorist groups. Houthi officials declined to confirm they had sent the emails or provide any additional comment, saying that was classified military information.

Greek-owned ships, which represent one of the largest fleets in the world, comprise nearly 30 per cent of the attacks carried out by Houthi forces to early September, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data that did not specify whether those ships had any ties with Israel.

In August, the Houthi militia — which is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance alliance of anti-Israel irregular armed groups — attacked the Sounion tanker leaving it on fire for weeks before it could be towed to a safer area. The strikes have prompted many cargoes to take a much longer route around Africa.

Published in Dawn, October 4th, 2024