East-West Pipeline Attack: Houthis Deny Medina, Claim Riyadh

Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, widely known as the Houthis, has denied carrying out the attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West crude oil pipeline near Medina that Riyadh acknowledged a day earlier, and claimed instead that its forces struck several pumping stations on the same line in the Riyadh area. Ansarullah military spokesman Yahya Saree made the claim on November 10, calling the Saudi account of an attack in the Medina region “a blatant lie” and stating that the operation “targeted the East-West pipeline in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, not in Madinah.” He named no weapon and gave no time for the strike, and Riyadh has not confirmed any strike on the line near the capital. The result is two irreconcilable accounts of where the pipeline that now carries the bulk of Saudi crude exports was hit.

The Saudi Energy Ministry had stated on November 9 that the East-West Pipeline was targeted in the Medina region that day, causing a limited fire near Medina that emergency crews extinguished, with no injuries and pipeline operations unaffected, and it named no attacker. Saree’s statement listed four operations: strikes on King Khalid International Airport and the Riyadh-area pumping stations, an attack on Aramco facilities at Abqaiq in the Eastern Province, a strike on what he called the financial centre of the Saudi capital, and attacks on troop gatherings at Al-Mudariba and Ras al-Ara in Yemen’s Lahj province. Major General Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, had reported only interceptions on November 10, with air defences having destroyed a ballistic and a cruise missile fired at Riyadh, a ballistic missile over the south and a drone over the Eastern Province whose launcher he did not identify.

The drone over the Eastern Province is the only interception the coalition reported anywhere near Abqaiq, although it stated that the drone was destroyed in the air. The claim of a strike on the financial district follows the night of November 8, when debris from intercepted missiles damaged the Aramco Tower in the capital, and Saree had already claimed strikes on pumping stations on October 24 and October 26 that Riyadh never confirmed. The Houthi-run Saba news agency reported on November 10 that Saudi airstrikes hit the al-Mufazir gas station in the Jadar district north of Sanaa and a state oil company building in the south of the city, and the movement’s health ministry stated that one person was killed and three were wounded. Riyadh has not confirmed those strikes, which followed the coalition’s announcement on November 9 that it had destroyed a missile factory and a solid propellant plant in Ansarullah-held territory.

Which part of the line was hit matters considerably for how long Saudi exports through the Red Sea could be disrupted, with the pumping stations being the most complex equipment along its route. The pipeline runs about 1,200 kilometres from Abqaiq to the Red Sea port of Yanbu and is rated at seven million barrels a day, and by some estimates it has carried around four million barrels of crude daily since the war with Iran disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Drones that Riyadh and Baghdad said were launched from Iraq forced a precautionary shutdown of the whole line on September 11, and Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman stated on October 6 that flows had been restored to 5.8 million barrels per day.