China has privately asked Iran to help rein in Yemen's Houthis after Saudi Arabia appealed to Beijing following the Iran-backed group's military offensive over the past week, Reuters reported Thursday, citing three Iranian sources familiar with the matter.
According to the sources, Riyadh sought China's help after the Houthis advanced rapidly along the Red Sea coast and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow waterway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Those gains have left Saudi oil exports and shipping more exposed.
Publicly, China has called for restraint, dialogue and the restoration of safe navigation. The sources said its private message to Tehran went further than those statements.
Beijing wants Iran to use its influence over the Houthis to keep the conflict from spreading further across energy routes that China, the world's second-largest economy, relies on.
The sources, who were briefed on the discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity, did not say how the message was delivered.
The Houthis are armed, trained and funded by Iran, according to Iranian sources and Western countries, and are part of Tehran's anti-Western, anti-Israel "Axis of Resistance." The group emerged in the 1990s in opposition to Saudi Arabia's Sunni religious influence in Yemen.
The request comes as the region faces a deepening energy crisis. Any Houthi threat to shipping in the Red Sea and through Bab el-Mandeb could sharply worsen the global energy crisis that began when Iran started blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and raises the risk of a wider regional war.
With Hormuz already effectively closed, sustained Houthi attacks on ships or ports in the Red Sea would disrupt the Middle East's two main oil-export routes at the same time, according to Reuters. That would open a new front both in the energy crisis and in Iran's broader confrontation with the United States.
One of the sources said Iran and its allies now exert pressure on both ends of the region's key shipping network, adding that "China depends on both."
