Houthi Attack on Saudi Arabia Targets Khamis Mushait

The Saudi-led coalition has intercepted ten ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Ansurullah movement, widely known as the Houthis, at the kingdom’s southern region on October 25, along with a cruise missile aimed at Khamis Mushait. The coalition’s statement, reported by The National and Al Jazeera, said a ballistic missile and a drone heading for Riyadh were also destroyed. Saudi Civil Defence reported that shrapnel from two intercepted missiles injured two people in Khamis Mushait and Ahad Rafidah and damaged three residential buildings and seven vehicles. The coalition did not identify the cruise missile’s type or the interceptors that engaged it. The salvo highlights how little warning Saudi air defences have in the south, where Khamis Mushait, home to the Royal Saudi Air Force’s King Khalid Air Base, lies less than 200 kilometres from the Houthi stronghold of Saada.

The cruise missile was far from the first the movement has fired since the war reignited in July. Coalition spokesman Major General Turki al-Maliki reported on October 13 that four cruise missiles had been destroyed over the Riyadh region and the south and a fifth over al-Kharj, on an evening when a ballistic missile aimed at Dhahran caused a limited fire at a Saudi Aramco office building. The latest attack followed interceptions over Taif and Yanbu on October 24, cities that sit well within the reach of the movement’s arsenal. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree announced seven operations against Saudi oil facilities and military bases, and warned as two terminals at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport reopened on October 25, stating: “King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh is not safe because it is a military target.”

The movement’s land-attack cruise missiles belong to the Quds family, which Western analysts trace to an Iranian design known in the United States as the “351”. Seven Quds-1 missiles were fired at the Khurais oil field in September 2019, with three of them having crashed short of the target. The movement claimed that a Quds-2 flew just over 400 miles to strike a Saudi Aramco facility in Jeddah on November 22, 2020, and by some estimates the Quds-1 reaches between 700 and 800 kilometres and the Quds-2 around 1,350 kilometres. Because cruise missiles fly far lower than ballistic missiles, ground-based radars see them considerably later, which was one reason Britain committed RAF Typhoon fighters to the kingdom’s defence in October.

Brigadier General Majed al-Nazili, spokesman for Yemen’s government forces, alleged in September that the movement had converted Iranian air defence missiles into loitering cruise missiles able to stay aloft for up to 25 minutes. Eleonora Ardemagni of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies told Al Jazeera there was no conclusive evidence of such a conversion. The coalition resumed its air campaign in September after the movement advanced along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab al-Mandab strait, and government forces launched Operation Dawn of Yemen on October 5, weeks before the Houthis claimed a strike on the Defence Ministry in Riyadh. Yemen’s armed forces said on October 25 that they had carried out 736 strikes on Houthi positions in 24 hours and destroyed 68 military vehicles, figures that have not been independently verified.