It’s an all-too-familiar scene. Old pickup trucks, their beds loaded down with camo-clad, AK-wielding militants, put-putting through unfortunate-looking streets in some nondescript Mideast locale. In the background: Scattered cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Death to America!” from onlookers.

That was Mokha late this week. On the off chance you’ve never been, Mokha’s in Yemen. It fell to the Houthis on Thursday, when the group managed to rout Saudi-backed forces and seize control of the city.

I know, I know: “So?” “Who cares?” Well, you do, actually. Even if you don’t know it. And even as not one in 10,000 Westerners could identify Yemen on an unmarked map. (In America, it’s probably more like one in 100,000.)

As the (marked) map below shows, Mokha’s very, very close to the Bab al-Mandab, where “very close” means just a few dozen miles from the chokepoint.

Mokha’s also 250 miles south of Sanaa, which means the Houthis are projecting at the very southern tip of the area they control.

In all likelihood, they’ll use Mokha as a staging ground for a push even further south, with the goal of establishing a stronghold on, or even in, the strait.

If you zoom in on a map, there’s a coastal town just south of Mokha called Dhubab. About 20 miles below Dhubab, and a couple of miles off the coast, is Perim Island. As the map below shows, the island’s inside the strait.

If the Houthis captured Dhubab and Perim, they’d have a chokehold on the chokepoint, so to speak.

Well, guess what? They captured both within 24 hours of overrunning Mokha.

“Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis reached the island of Perim in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on Friday, moving to tighten their grip on a vital global shipping route in the widening Mideast war,” Reuters reported, citing four Yemeni government sources.

The same linked article said a pair of officials inside the Saudi-backed, internationally-recognized government confirmed its forces “had pulled out of Perim and that the Houthis had also taken the mainland Red Sea coastal town of Dhubab.”

Later Friday, Riyadh announced a closure of the 7 million barrel-a-day East-West pipeline that sends Saudi crude across the Kingdom for loading near the Red Sea. The energy ministry described the closure as a precautionary measure amid Houthi attacks.

In remarks carried by The New York Times, Adam Baron, an expert on Yemen, called the Houthi’s southern push “one of the more significant turning points of the Yemen conflict.” Dhubab and Perim, he said, are “arguably Yemen’s most strategically valuable real estate.”

In the same piece, the Times paraphrased Baron in noting that Iran and its allies now exercise “at least partial control of both the Arabian Peninsula’s major maritime chokepoints.”

There was no immediate word from John Baron on what, if any, action the US Navy might take in response.