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Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, two U.S. Navy destroyers shot down half a dozen Houthi-launched munitions while escorting U.S.-flagged merchant ships through the Gulf of Aden. The successful transit illustrates the service's defensive capabilities, but also shows the Houthis' continued ability to target passing shipping at will – despite multiple rounds of U.S. airstrikes on the group's bases in Yemen. <\/p>\n
According to U.S. Central Command, destroyers USS Stockdale <\/em>and USS O'Kane<\/em> were escorting three U.S. merchant ships through the Gulf of Aden on Saturday when they came under fire. The destroyers shot down three anti-ship ballistic missiles, three attack drones and one anti-ship cruise missile over the course of two days. <\/p>\n "These actions reflect the ongoing commitment of [Central Command] forces to protect U.S. personnel, regional partners and international shipping against attacks by Iran-backed Houthis," CENTCOM said in a statement. <\/p>\n Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree identified the target vessels as the product tanker Stena Impeccable, <\/em>the boxship Maersk Saratoga<\/em> and the bulker Liberty Grace. <\/em>As of Monday morning, all three vessels were in port at Djibouti, where the U.S. maintains a military base. <\/p>\n "The strikes were accurate and direct," said Saree. "The [Houthis] will continue to carry out their military operations at an escalating pace . . . [and] will not stop except by stopping the aggression and lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip." <\/p>\n maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, two U.S. Navy destroyers shot down half a dozen Houthi-launched munitions while escorting U.S.-flagged merchant ships through the Gulf of Aden. The successful transit illustrates the service's defensive capabilities, but also shows the Houthis' continued ability to target passing shipping at will – despite multiple rounds of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[17208,17015,21249,8806,423,1243,1241,19618,515],"class_list":["post-52522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-barrage","tag-defend","tag-destroyers","tag-houthi","tag-merchant","tag-missile","tag-ships","tag-sm-3","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/52523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}