Houthi Jazan Attack: What the Al-Tuwal Missile Claim Says

Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, widely known as the Houthis, has claimed a strike with two ballistic missiles on what it called concentrations of Saudi forces at Al-Tuwal, a border district of Jazan province that faces Yemen’s Haradh district. The movement’s military spokesman, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, made the claim on November 13, only hours after Saudi Arabia’s civil defence had issued an all-clear for the province, stating that dozens of personnel including Sudanese nationals had been killed or wounded. Saudi authorities had issued no statement by the morning of November 14, and neither the strike nor the casualty figures have been independently verified. The claim highlights how the movement is pairing long-range attacks on the Saudi capital with fire on Saudi border positions, a pattern that was a fixture of the war before the truce of April 2022.

The Jazan claim was issued alongside a separate statement in which Saree said the movement had launched one drone at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh and two at Pumping Station No. 3 on the East-West Pipeline east of the capital, stating that both operations had achieved their objectives while offering no evidence of damage. It follows two days of interceptions announced by the coalition’s spokesman, Major General Turki al-Maliki. He reported on November 11 that air defences had destroyed three cruise missiles aimed at the Riyadh region along with two drones, and on November 12 that two more drones had been brought down over the Riyadh area and the Eastern Province. The movement had claimed strikes on pumping stations near Riyadh only days earlier, and Saudi Arabia has not confirmed physical damage to any of them.

The choice of targets reflects a considerably sharper reading of Saudi vulnerabilities than the movement’s earlier campaigns. With shipping through the Strait of Hormuz disrupted by the war with Iran, Riyadh has rerouted roughly four million barrels of crude a day through the East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, about four percent of global supply, which makes its pumping stations among the most valuable fixed targets in the kingdom. Jazan itself hosts a Saudi Aramco refinery with a capacity of 400,000 barrels a day, and the province has absorbed repeated missile and drone attacks on military and energy sites over the past decade. Interceptions over the capital have not removed the danger either, with debris from an intercepted missile having damaged the Aramco Tower in the King Abdullah Financial District on November 8.

The escalation follows the movement’s advance in September towards the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which intensified fighting with the Saudi-led coalition and the internationally recognised government it backs, as well as a coalition strike announced on November 9 that it said had destroyed a missile factory and a solid fuel plant. Fighting between government forces and Ansarullah resumed in July after a relatively calm period that had lasted since April 2022, and has left about 12,000 people dead or wounded according to United Nations figures. The movement has since announced a mobilisation for a push on the cities of Taiz and Aden. Saree’s statement named neither the type of ballistic missile fired at Al-Tuwal nor the Saudi unit it was said to have struck.