Houthis are said to have cut internet cables – politics

It is more than 25,000 kilometers long, about as thick as an arm, and probably weighs around 70 kilograms over a length of one meter. The Asia-Africa-Europe 1 submarine cable connects 19 countries from France to Hong Kong with extremely fast internet, up to 40 terabytes per second. At least that’s how it’s been for the past seven years. Data traffic in Asia-Africa-Europe 1 has now come to a standstill, cut off somewhere in the Red Sea between Yemen and Djibouti. Around fifteen cables run from Asia to Europe, four of which, according to the Hong Kong network operator HGC, are currently no longer functional, affecting a quarter of the data traffic in this region.

Israeli media had been reporting for several days that the cables had been destroyed in the Red Sea and speculated that the Islamist Houthi militia could be behind it. It has been bombarding shipping traffic in the Red Sea for months, which ultimately led to only about half of the cargo ships taking the route through the Suez Canal; the others prefer to take the safe detour via the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, which is significantly expensive and is longer. This drastic hindrance to world trade is a great success for the Houthis. Their reason: Ships from countries that support the war against Gaza are no longer allowed to pass through their waters.

The Houthis have neither divers nor submarines

In reality, the Houthis have so far fired quite indiscriminately on cargo ships and tankers, even those carrying goods for their own starving population. Nevertheless, large parts of the Arab world celebrate them as the only group that really sides with the Palestinians.

Disrupting important internet connections would be another major propaganda success. The internationally recognized government of Yemen, with which the militant Islamists fought a long civil war, warned at the beginning of February that the Houthis could cut cables. A little later they spoke of the impending use of a “submarine weapon”. The first reports of a cut cable came on February 24th. The puzzle pieces seemed to make sense. At least one Israeli media outlet immediately blamed the Houthis.

But one question remained: How were the Houthis supposed to have reached the cables, which are probably several hundred meters deep? They have neither divers nor submarines. Experts think it is more likely that the submarine cables were cut by a ship’s anchor. “Our team believes it is plausible that the cable was affected by the pulling of the anchor, as there is a lot of shipping traffic in the area and the seabed is low in many parts of the Red Sea,” said a spokesman for Seacom, a company that operates one of the cables. However, only a repair ship can bring information to the site. Satellite images analyzed by the SZ show that the Rubymar could have been there at the time where the cables were probably cut.

20,000 tons of fertilizer sank with the “Rubymar”.

The Belize-flagged ship was hit by a Houthi missile on February 18th and has since sunk. Before that, it had drifted through the sea for around 70 kilometers without a driver as the crew had been brought to safety. But cutting the cables would not be the only damage that resulted from the Houthi rocket attack. Because with that Rubymar 20,000 tons of fertilizer sank.

Open detailed view

Estimating the ecological consequences of the reduced fertilizer load is not easy, even for experts, as long as the local conditions are unclear. At what depth is the ship? How quickly is the fertilizer released and what exactly is its composition? How strong is the current? If large quantities of fertilizer quickly enter the surface water, an algae bloom could occur regionally, says chemist Hermann Bange from the Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel. The Red Sea is generally rather poor in nutrients, so algae on the surface would benefit from the nutrient boost and would probably multiply suddenly as a result.

Whether this has negative consequences depends primarily on the species that then prevail; it cannot be predicted. If, on the other hand, the fertilizer slowly reaches the depths, it will probably be distributed quickly by the current, so that there will hardly be a noticeable effect. Boran Kartal, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, assumes that the fertilizer will not be released suddenly and that there will probably be no long-term changes to the ecosystem as a result of the sinking of the fish Rubymar will give.

However, the consequences of a possible bloom of harmful algae in the region are difficult to assess. “Harmful algal blooms occur regularly in the nutrient-rich Baltic Sea, but practically never occur in the nutrient-poor Red Sea.” Depending on how the bloom progresses, fish stocks in the region could be affected, at least temporarily. The amounts of nutrients that are expected to be released around the wreck are comparable to nutrient inputs in densely populated coastal regions on the Red Sea.