Why Houthi Attacks on Saudi Arabia Still Get Through

The Houthis want Riyadh’s airport to stay shut until Sanaa’s airport reopens. In their telling, Saudi Arabia besieges them by sea, air and land, so they will besiege Saudi Arabia by sea, air and land in return. That ambition is unrealistic. Saudi Arabia is neither small nor weak, and it is plainly determined to hold the initiative in this war at a moment when many people doubt it can.

Striking a capital’s airport is a serious act. But the strike is not aimed at the Saudi leadership or the Saudi army. It is aimed at the home front. The question the Houthis are trying to force is whether Saudi citizens will tire of the war and decide that the economic damage is not worth it, or whether they will stand behind their leadership. That is the question that will decide this war, and the Saudi answer so far is clear.

The missiles come with a media campaign. Houthi outlets and social media accounts spread an extraordinary volume of rumours about damage inside Saudi Arabia. Some even claimed that Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman had been killed when the Houthis claimed a strike on the defence ministry in Riyadh on 22 October. The prince is, in fact, in Tehran this week leading a diplomatic mission. The point of the rumours is to make the world believe that Riyadh is under constant bombardment and cannot keep its own airport open.

The Wall Street Journal, in its reporting on Saudi Arabia’s military limitations, put the blame where it belongs: not on the competence of Saudi crews but on the size of the country. Patriot batteries and other systems defend specific places, and where they stand, they work. That interception rate, above 90 percent, is higher than what the United States achieved against Iran’s barrages.

The Houthis understand this. They appear to have intelligence on which facilities sit outside the air-defence umbrella, and they aim there. Against defended areas they send waves of drones and low-flying cruise missiles alongside ballistic missiles to saturate the batteries. No country, however rich, can put a Patriot battery over every square kilometre of a territory nearly four times the size of France.

The economics favour the attacker. A Houthi drone can cost around $20,000; the Patriot interceptor fired to stop it costs about $3 million, and some estimates run higher. Even a successful interception is a loss on paper, and interceptors take a long time to replace.

This is where Saudi Arabia’s allies come in. Under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye, an armed attack on one member counts as an attack on all. Pakistan is sending Chinese-made air defences, Türkiye is sending systems it builds at home, and Egypt is sending its Skyguard Amoun guns and missiles. Those additional layers are what will cover the gaps the Houthis are exploiting.

The heart of this war is on Yemen’s coast. Saudi Arabia wants to push the Houthis back from the territory they hold along the Red Sea shore overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait, so that they lose the ability to blockade the kingdom from the Red Sea. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz is hard; reopening Bab el-Mandeb and defeating the Houthis on the ground is within reach.

For that, the Journal reported, Riyadh relies on forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognised government, and their performance has not been impressive. The force that has actually pushed the Houthis back and inflicted real damage is the Giants Brigades, which answer to the Southern Transitional Council rather than to the government. Saudi Arabia’s bet on government forces is therefore a long-term one, and the Journal reported that Riyadh has found a way to speed it up: bringing in fighters from abroad to reinforce them. Saudi instructors are training these recruits in camps inside Yemen.

The Houthis have gone after those camps, with strikes on 15, 16, 17 and 19 October. The worst came on 19 October at a training camp in Shabwa province, where four battalions were due to train under Saudi instructors. A drone circled overhead as training began. Then ballistic missiles hit the camp, killing about 75 recruits and wounding about 200; the Shabwa governor’s latest figures were 77 killed and 195 wounded. A further missile struck men as they fled.

The Houthis are fighting Saudi Arabia’s way: hitting reinforcements and ammunition depots on their way to the front, as the coalition does to them. They have also penetrated the government side. Yemen’s main telecommunications network has long been under their control and lets them intercept calls; informants inside the camp may have passed on its schedule; and the drone that watched the Shabwa drill shows they can slip past government air defences. This is a war of trial and error, and it will be long. The Houthis want Taiz at any cost, and Marib after it.

The Houthis have crossed lines that even Saudi Arabia did not expect them to cross. On 24 October Saudi civil defence responded to falling debris in the Mecca and Medina regions after intercepting two Houthi missiles. One piece came down in Wadi al-Mughammas outside Mecca, the valley where, according to Islamic tradition, Abraha camped with his elephants before marching on the Kaaba. The Houthis called the Saudi account a “huge lie”.

The symbolism is the message. The Houthis are waging a religious war as well as a political and military one. They want to cut Saudi Arabia off from every source of income, including pilgrimage and religious tourism, and above all to tell the world that the King of Saudi Arabia, who carries the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, cannot protect them.

American coverage now argues that Saudi Arabia walked into a trap. What hits Saudi Arabia costs far more than what Saudi Arabia hits. Saudi jets have destroyed tunnels, killed commanders and acted on good intelligence, and each strike lands hard on the Houthis; but no single blow in Yemen matches the cost of a missile on a Saudi airport or pipeline.

In that reading, the trap was sprung when Saudi Arabia struck the runway at Sanaa airport on 13 July. Riyadh was convinced that an Iranian plane heading there was carrying fighters and Revolutionary Guard officers, and it was the second such flight after a first was turned back by Saudi jets. Iran, by this account, wanted the Saudi-Houthi war back: as long as it runs, it drains Saudi Arabia and splits American attention.

This war grew out of a bigger one. When the war between the United States and Iran went quiet, the Saudi-Houthi war broke out, and both Washington and Riyadh have fought it the same way, mainly from the air, with the same limited results. The US expected to settle Iran in two months on the assumption that Iran could not see inside American bases in the Gulf; it turned out that Russia and China were helping Iran target them. If the US-Iran war returns, Washington will concentrate on Iran and pull back the support it gives Riyadh, including some 200 American intelligence specialists working with the Saudi military. Saudi Arabia cannot count on American forces joining the fight against the Houthis.

The trap argument counts only what Saudi Arabia spends. It leaves out what Riyadh has built since the war began: a defence pact with two nuclear and military powers, Egyptian air defences on the way, and a diplomatic channel to Tehran that it controls. A kingdom with no way out would not be negotiating from that position.

Saudi Arabia is fighting and talking at the same time. Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin are due in Tehran on Monday for a joint meeting with Iranian officials led by Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The meeting follows Munir’s own visit to Tehran last week, and Saudi Arabia describes it as part of the Mecca pact states’ effort to de-escalate. We have already examined why the three chiefs are in Tehran. This is the last real attempt to find a way to negotiate before the war widens.

The talks coincide with a decisive day in Cairo. Egypt’s House of Representatives is holding a closed, roll-call vote on 26 October on whether to authorise President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to provide military support to Saudi Arabia if Riyadh formally asks. Approval needs two-thirds of the chamber, 398 of 596 members. Sisi has insisted that “we’re talking only about defence”.

Egypt has already paid for its word. The Egyptian stock market and the pound took heavy blows from Sisi’s announcement alone: about $1.9 billion of hot money left Egypt in a week and the dollar reached 55.30 pounds. Once the vote passes, the damage will deepen, because Egypt will be a party to the war. That is the answer to anyone who claims Cairo joined for the sake of a Saudi deposit at its central bank: no country takes losses like these for a deposit. Parliament has given the negotiations plenty of time, delaying its vote once in case talks between Iran, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia succeed. But Egypt gave its word, and it cannot take it back.