March 17, 2025 (EIRNS)—The U.S. has launched airstrikes against the Houthi movement in Yemen for the third night in a row. Al Jazeera cited Houthi-affiliated al-Masirah television reporting that U.S. strikes hit an iron factory in the Bajil District of the western Hodeidah governorate.
The newest round of strikes came following another threatening statement by President Trump in which he said that the U.S. will hold Iran responsible for every shot fired by the Houthis. “Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” he said. “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”
The strikes launched by the U.S. military on both March 16 and March 15 included airstrikes launched from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman using F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters and Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles fired from U.S. Navy vessels, a U.S. official told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The strikes are the largest U.S. military operation in the Middle East since Trump took office.
“The minute the Houthis say, ‘We’ll stop shooting at your ships, we’ll stop shooting at your drones,’ this campaign will end, but until then it will be unrelenting,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Fox News on March 16, before the second wave of strikes.
“This is not a message. This is not a one-off. This is an effort to deny them the ability to continue to constrict and control shipping,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an appearance on CBS.
A U.S. official told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the U.S. military campaign could consist of a nearly daily series of strikes lasting weeks. Not said is whether the U.S. Navy has a sufficient supply of munitions to continue the campaign for that long, since supplies of missiles and other munitions became an issue in 2024 during then-President Joe Biden’s campaign against the Houthis.
The Houthis said this morning that their forces had launched a second wave of attacks on the Truman, following an earlier wave of attacks that included 18 missiles and drones, following the U.S. strikes on Saturday night, March 15.
