This one hit me hard when I read it this morning. On Thursday, Yemen’s Houthis said they had carried out six missile and drone attacks across Saudi Arabia in one go — not in Yemen, but deep inside the kingdom itself.
Their spokesman, Yahya Saree, listed the targets: the Ras Tanura refinery, an Aramco facility in Abqaiq, the Rabigh refinery, King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, and a Saudi military headquarters in the Najran region. Missiles for most of them, a drone for Dammam. He said the strikes were an answer to recent Saudi strikes on areas the Houthis hold in Yemen.
Now, I have to be straight with you: these are Houthi claims, and nobody outside has confirmed all six. What we do know is that the Saudi-led coalition says its air defences shot down missiles aimed at Riyadh on Thursday evening. Saudi Civil Defence says falling shrapnel wounded one person in Riyadh and damaged a house and a car. Warning alerts went out in Riyadh, al-Kharj, and Najran before the interceptions. So something real flew over the capital that night, even if the full six-site claim is still unverified.
What makes this sting is the timing. Just days earlier, senior officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan sat down in Tehran and agreed to keep talking about peace and safety in the region. The Saudi foreign ministry itself stressed opening channels of negotiation to stop the fighting from coming back. And then, within days, we get this — six claimed strikes, airports and refineries on the list.
Here is why airports and refineries matter so much to ordinary people. An airport is where families fly home, where workers travel, where aid and goods move. A refinery is where the fuel that runs trucks, planes, and power plants comes from. Hit those two kinds of places and the pain does not stay on a battlefield. Oil prices already jumped on Friday on the news, and we all know where that ends up: at the pump, and then in the price of everything that moves by truck.
My honest take: I keep thinking about the person in Riyadh who was hurt by falling shrapnel — not a soldier, just someone at home when pieces of a shot-down missile came down. And about the travellers at two big airports who had no idea their airport was on a target list. That is what this war looks like now. It is no longer only about front lines in Yemen. It is about airports, fuel, and shipping lanes that the whole world depends on.
Yemen’s internationally recognised government has now asked the UN Security Council to take strong measures to stop Houthi attacks on Aden airport. The Houthis, for their part, say 27 people were killed in Saudi airstrikes on areas they hold — again, their claim, not confirmed on its own. Both sides are trading blows while ordinary people on both sides pay for it.
I hope the Tehran talks were not just words. Because if six claimed strikes in one day is the new normal, then the next headline could be worse. For now, I will be watching whether Riyadh answers with more strikes, or whether someone picks up the phone. The people living under these missiles deserve the second option.
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