Energy minister says ‘fear has no place in the Saudi lexicon’ as paramilitary group again breaches stretched defences
Why are the Houthis attacking Saudi airports and how are the missiles getting through?
Saudi Arabia has been forced to suspend all flights to and from its main international airport in Riyadh until next Saturday after a further round of Houthi missile attacks caused more damage and left one person dead. Some airlines, including Gulf Air and Bahrain Air, had already said they were cancelling flights until next Saturday. More missiles were fired at Saudi Arabian cities by the Houthis on Monday, Saudi Arabian’s military spokesperson said.
The Gulf nation announced it was suspending flights from Riyadh, its second busiest airport, after Houthi missiles killed 13 people on Saturday and left more than 300 injured. Saudi state TV broadcast CCTV footage that showed passengers deluged in smoke and falling masonry as they queued at the airport terminal to board a plane just as the Houthi missile struck.
The country has pressed ahead with the 25th WPC Energy Conference in Riyadh, hoping to project an image of normality. But some senior oil executives did not attend or appeared virtually.
The Saudi energy minister, Abdulaziz bin Salman, told the conference that “fear has no place in the Saudi lexicon”, emphasising the resilience of the kingdom’s energy system and the determination of its people to confront crises. Amin Nasser, the president and chief executive of Aramco, said Saudi Arabia had invested deeply in protecting its supplies, but “no nation, even one as capable and confident as ours, can safeguard them alone.”
He added: “Markets can diversify suppliers. They cannot diversify geography […] when energy infrastructure in this region is targeted, the consequences reach economies everywhere.”
An urgent review is under way as to how Houthi missiles are repeatedly penetrating badly stretched Saudi air defences. Schoolchildren and some office workers were advised to work from home. The Houthis have also targeted the city of Khamis Mushait, and the King Fahd international airport in Dammam.
Interceptor missiles are needed to protect government buildings, oil facilities and infrastructure hubs across a wide geographic area. The Houthis have vowed to attack Saudi airports across the country.
Houthi attacks since last month have targeted fuel tanks at Riyadh airport and its affiliated warehouses, destroying a parked Airbus A320 passenger plane and damaging at least five other aircraft.
The crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has not been seen in public since Tuesday last week, reflecting the pressure he is under to find a way out from a war that has intermittently dogged his leadership since 2014. Saudi Arabia badly needs stability to continue the slow diversification of its economy from oil dependence, but has not found a way to restore it in Yemen.
Inside Yemen, fighting continued in and around Taiz, the third city, and the most populous governorate, with Saudi planes mounting eight separate strikes on any assembly of Houthi forces. As many as 60 fighters died on Sunday from both sides.
The governor of Taiz, Nabil Shamsan, on Sunday issued an urgent call to lift the Houthi siege and warned a shortage of medicines meant the city would soon run out of emergency surgical and intensive care services.
Overall the Houthis claimed the Saudis had mounted 124 raids on Sunday. The Saudis are seeking to locate Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the reclusive leader of the Houthis, with rumours of his assassination repeatedly circulating, but Saudi Arabia does not seem to have contemporary intelligence on his precise whereabouts either in the capital Sana’a or in its stronghold of Saada.
On the diplomatic front, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, spoke to the Saudi foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan, on Sunday to see if there was a way in which Iran could act as a mediator between the Saudis and the Houthis, a group that Iran has trained and armed. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi Political Bureau claimed Saudi Arabia accepted the mediation offered by Iran and proposed first a one-month truce, and then a two week truce, but the Houthis had rejected both offers.
He said “the battle this time is not like its predecessors; the arena is no longer the same arena, and the cards have changed. Therefore, a comprehensive settlement must be put in place between Riyadh and Sana’a, the Houthi capital because every day that passes in this battle will expand its scope and deepen its losses, and the settlement that is possible today may become difficult or impossible tomorrow”.
A meeting of the UN security council in New York on Tuesday is expected to debate a resolution calling the Houthis a foreign terrorist organisation.
The exiled leader of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), Aidarous al-Zubaidi, called for southern forces to fight on all fronts, and not just to defend the borders of the former South Yemen, in a move that is likely to be welcomed by Saudi Arabia as it supports the week-old call by the UN-recognised government to drive the Houthis out of the whole of Yemen, rather than just from the southern governorates.
The STC has a vision of an independent South Yemen that would recreate the separate state that existed between 1967 and 1990. The reunification of Yemen at the end of the cold war proved fragile and many southerners nurse longstanding grievances about the distribution of resources in the unified state.
The STC’s authority has been challenged by Abd al-Rahman al-Mahrami, the Salafist leader who commands the powerful Southern Giants Brigades.
Despite Araghchi’s efforts to reach out to the Saudis, Mohsen Rezaei, the more hardline secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, claimed Iran was hitting five or six small vessels in the strait of Hormuz every night, explaining the vessels were being used by the Emirati military to move oil through the strait to larger tankers, thus breaching the blockade that Iran is seeking to maintain to push up oil prices and weaken Donald Trump.
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said Trump’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including his call for the Ukrainian president to stand aside showed the risks in dealing with Trump. He said: “Being an enemy of America can be dangerous, but being a friend of America is deadly. You can see for yourself what America’s friendship and enmity with its allies is like.”