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Saudi Arabia’s air defenses were activated on Tuesday evening after Houthi missiles were fired towards the capital Riyadh. An oil facility belonging to Saudi Aramco’s administrative department suffered a limited fire after being hit by a missile, while there were no casualties, the Saudi energy ministry said. Debris from two of the intercepted Houthi cruise missiles had also wounded four people including a child with the missiles’ debris causing damage to 15 homes, Civil Defense officials said.
The attacks in Saudi Arabia came just hours after the Saudi-led coalition targeted oil and fuel depots in Sanaa, Dhamar and Saada. The coalition said these facilities were used by the Houthis to replenish their arsenal of missiles and drones that could target Riyadh, the coasts of Yemen and even ships in the Red Sea. Just before the coalition’s strike in Sanaa, it had issued an evacuation order for the Yemeni capital for the first time since the war started in July.
It comes a day after the Houthis attacked Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport killing 13 people in the deadliest attack on Saudi soil in recent years. The Houthis had threatened to attack the airport in Riyadh and a refinery and an Aramco facility in Dammam if the coalition went ahead with its plans to strike Sanaa. France has since told its citizens to avoid the terminals at Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam airports.
The Saudi cabinet, under the chair of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said in a statement released following its meeting that the kingdom would not permit a threat to its security or the freedom to navigate through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait. The key question for Washington is whether this becomes a regional war it gets dragged into, and whether any US response would be another open-ended commitment of the kind the country has already paid for in blood and treasure too many times.
