Saudi East-West Pipeline Attack: What Did the Houthis Hit?

Yemen’s Ansurullah movement, widely known as the Houthis, has claimed drone strikes on pumping stations along Saudi Arabia’s East-West crude oil pipeline and a ballistic missile attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the second claimed attack on the pipeline in three days. The claims were made on October 26 by the movement’s military spokesman Yahya Saree, who named no stations and offered no evidence of damage, and neither Riyadh nor the state oil company Saudi Aramco has confirmed any hit on the line. The Saudi-led coalition stated hours earlier that Saudi air defences had intercepted a ballistic missile fired towards the capital. The pipeline has become the kingdom’s most important export route since the war largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, making its pumping stations considerably more valuable targets than airports for a movement seeking leverage over Riyadh.

Coalition spokesman Major General Turki al-Maliki stated that coalition forces had destroyed two ballistic missile launchers in Sanaa, one of which he said had been used in the attack on Riyadh, before pledging on social media: “We will continue the operation to dismantle the Houthi militia’s ballistic missile network.” The strikes followed a wider operation announced that morning, which the coalition said destroyed five tunnels used to store ballistic missiles, four launch platforms and a missile depot. None of these figures has been independently verified, and the coalition did not say where the tunnels were or which weapons it used. The exchange follows the coalition’s report on October 25 that it had downed ten ballistic missiles and a cruise missile aimed at the south of the kingdom, and an October 10 attack on the Riyadh airport which killed 13 people, the deadliest in Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.

The East-West pipeline runs about 1,200 kilometres from Abqaiq in the Eastern Province to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, and Saudi Aramco rates it at seven million barrels per day. Its vulnerability was demonstrated in September, when drones that Riyadh and Baghdad said were launched from Iraq struck the line, forcing a precautionary shutdown on September 11 with three of its pumping stations reportedly hit. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman stated on October 6 that flows had been restored to 5.8 million barrels per day, significantly short of its rated capacity. Pumping stations are a particularly attractive target, with analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies having noted that they take longer to repair than a breached pipe, and Ansurullah’s ballistic missiles now reach almost every part of the kingdom, Yanbu included.

The movement has struck the same pipeline before, with drones hitting two pumping stations on May 14, 2019, and forcing Aramco to halt flows temporarily, and the current fighting has effectively ended the UN-brokered truce that had largely held since 2022. Ansurullah’s advance along Yemen’s Red Sea coast towards the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in September and the intensified Saudi air campaign that followed have produced the most direct confrontation between Riyadh and the Houthis in four years and highlighted why the movement targets Saudi economic lifelines. Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistani army chief Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin were due in Tehran on October 26 for the first high-level talks between Iran and all three members of the Mecca Pact since the attacks on the kingdom escalated.