The sirens of the ambulances that rushed to Riyadh's King Khalid airport this Saturday alerted the residents of the Saudi capital that something serious had happened. Then came the official silence, broken when international media revealed that 12 people had died from the impact of a missile from the Yemeni Houthis in terminal 3 of the airfield. It was already night when the General Aviation Authority of Saudi Arabia recognized those dead and 309 injured, several in critical condition. This attack claimed by the Shiite insurgents this Sunday will have a response, Riyadh promised a few hours before another projectile caused several injuries in another terminal at the same airport. The Houthi bombings and the announced Saudi response fuel fears of a new regional escalation into which the United States could be dragged. Donald Trump said this Saturday that he was “studying” bombing the Yemeni rebels.
“It is too early to say precisely what the consequences [of the bombing of the Riyadh airport] will be,” emphasizes Allison Minor, director of the Atlantic Council think tank, in an analysis published on her social accounts. This expert, a former United States delegate representative in Yemen, believes “the attack is likely to expand the war at least in the short term: deepening Saudi determination to impose serious military costs on the Houthis and potentially attracting at least limited US intervention.”
The war against Yemen's Shiite insurgents, in which Saudi Arabia could now become even more mired, was fueled last summer, not by chance at an airport. On July 13, the forces of the internationally recognized Government of Yemen, in conflict with the Houthis and supported by an international coalition led by Riyadh, bombed the runway of the Sana'a airport, in the third of Yemen controlled by the Shiite militiamen. They intended to thwart the landing of the plane carrying the Houthi delegation that had attended the funeral of Ali Khamenei, the deceased supreme leader of his main supporter, Iran.
That bombing broke the fragile truce that had left the war in limbo since 2022. The Houthis then returned to attack the Arab kingdom with missiles and drones, but not without warning airlines not to fly through Saudi airspace until Riyadh's "siege" of the Sanaa airport and other airfields in the area under its control was lifted.
A “blockade by blockade” strategy was summarized this Sunday by Danny Citrinowizc, former Iran analyst for the Israeli army, in statements to BBCurdu. “The Houthis made their position very clear from the beginning: If our planes cannot land at Sanaa international airport, then civilian planes should not be able to land at Saudi airports either.”
For this analyst, the message to Riyadh is clear: "If Yemen remains under blockade, Saudi Arabia cannot expect to remain isolated from the consequences of the war. In other words, as long as the restrictions at Sana'a airport remain in force, Saudi civilian airports will not be able to operate normally."
On September 19, the Houthis achieved a milestone in that strategy. That day they hit the King Khalid airport for the first time with a missile that hit a fuel tank, an impact that pointed to the fragility of the Saudi anti-aircraft defenses, which was definitively highlighted this Saturday, when the warning systems of the prosperous Arab kingdom did not issue alerts in the face of the arrival of the Houthi missile.
That day, the Houthis hit a fuel depot. This Saturday, a terminal at Riyadh airport, a civilian target where, in addition to Saudis and people of other nationalities, an American died, something that could weigh on Donald Trump's nationalist rhetoric when deciding whether to get involved in Yemen. On September 10, the president of the United States ignored the request of the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed Bin Salmán, to bomb the Houthis.
Major General Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the military coalition led by Riyadh in Yemen, accused the Houthis on Saturday of committing “a full-blown war crime,” and promised that there will be a response. On that same day, the military confirmed, another projectile fell near the King Fahd international airport in Dammam, in the east of the kingdom.
The general's warning not only allows us to foresee the intensification of the bombing campaign by Saudi aviation in Yemen, at a time when Shiite rebels allied with Iran are fighting with the recognized government for control of the Bab el Mandeb Strait. Since February, Riyadh has been using this route, which connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden, as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, blocked by Iran, to export almost half of its oil production, about 3.5 million barrels per day. Yemeni government forces had managed this week with Saudi support to recover part of the coastal territory in Yemen that allowed the rebels to block the passage of Saudi oil tankers.
The lethal attack against the King Khalid airport, more serious than the previous attacks that had already caused four other victims this week, seems, in part, a response by the Houthis to this military advance by their enemies. His strategy makes one think of the one adopted by Iran since the beginning of the war unleashed against it by Israel and the United States in February.
The Iranians have two armies, but they practically lack bombers or fighter planes—in fact they have a few, but very obsolete—nor air defense systems valid to stop the attacks of the sophisticated air forces of Israel and the United States. Much less do the Houthis, a militia, have them. The warlike response of both had to be asymmetrical. Iran has a large arsenal of missiles and, even more so, drones, and its response to the bombings was to attack US bases and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf countries allied with Washington. Above all, it blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a tool of economic strangulation.
The Houthis have responded to the escalation of the war with Saudi Arabia by attacking oil and civil aviation facilities in the Arab kingdom. They also blocked the Bab el Mandeb Strait for Saudi ships, before the Yemeni government allied with Riyadh reversed its territorial advance.
Although the Houthis are more of an ally of Iran than a mere satellite—they have a high degree of autonomy—the attacks on airports hint at Iran's shadow. Shiite insurgents have improved their ability to assemble and use their own weapons in recent years, but it is an open secret that their missiles and drones are of Iranian origin. This was established in 2016 by a panel of experts from the United Nations Security Council.
One of the members of that panel, researcher Fernando Carvajal, assured this newspaper in a recent interview that Iran provides the Houthis with the intelligence information that they lack, and that it is essential to guarantee the precision of attacks like those this weekend.
Bombs and economy
In a war in the Middle East “that is as much about the economy as it is about bombings,” Mohammed Sergie emphasizes in an analysis on the Semafor portal, the deaths at Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport place the Saudi authorities and especially their strong man, Prince Bin Salman, in a dilemma. Above all, because, Allison Minor emphasizes, they constitute “a harsh reminder of how the war in Yemen undermines other Saudi priorities.”
Bin Salmán has been promoting the so-called 2030 Agenda for years, an ambitious economic diversification project to overcome economic dependence on oil. That plan involved regional appeasement and washing the image of Saudi Arabia. The prince aspired to present his country as a top tourist destination, but, above all, as a safe and attractive haven for trillions of dollars in financial assets, data centers and emerging companies. To do this, he needs oil money, a manna that Houthi control of the Red Sea, added to the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, could endanger.
The choice of this weekend for the deadly bombing of the main Saudi airport does not seem coincidental, but rather one more element of that asymmetric war of the Houthis. Another of the crown prince's goals is to turn his country into an international center for high-level summits. Riyadh hosts the World Petroleum Congress this week, which was expected to be attended by executives from multinationals in the sector such as Shell, BP, Total and ExxonMobil, Shell. At the end of the month, Saudi Arabia will host the so-called Future Investment Initiative, which usually hosts top Wall Street businessmen. With the airports threatened and the shadow of more than a dozen deaths, it is to be expected that some of them will refrain from attending these appointments.
