Saudi National Guard Loses AH-6i Helicopter Near Najran as Ansurullah Claims Apache Shootdown

The Saudi Arabian National Guard has lost a Boeing AH-6i light attack and reconnaissance helicopter in the Najran region on the border with Yemen, with both officers aboard killed in what the Saudi-led coalition has attributed to a technical malfunction rather than enemy fire. Coalition spokesman Major General Turki al-Maliki announced the loss on October 18, stating that the aircraft had come down inside Saudi territory, a day after Yemen’s Ansurullah movement, widely known as the Houthis, claimed to have shot down a Saudi AH-64 Apache attack helicopter near Najran. Neither side has released imagery of wreckage that would show whether the two accounts describe the same aircraft. The loss highlights how exposed Saudi helicopter crews have again become since the war reignited in July, ending a truce that had largely held since April 2022.

Ansurullah military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree stated on October 17 that the movement had brought down an Apache “using an appropriate weapon” while it was attacking the movement’s positions along the border, without naming the missile or releasing footage. Al-Maliki’s statement on X said: “The helicopter crashed due to a technical malfunction, resulting in the martyrdom of its two-officer crew.” He answered the claim separately with a photograph of a line of Apaches, writing: “You claim to have shot it down, but it will enter the battlefield soon.” Nothing independent has confirmed either account, and the AH-6i, a single engine derivative of the Little Bird flown by U.S. Army special operations units, is a considerably smaller aircraft than the twin engine Apache.

The crash follows weeks of escalating cross-border fire, with the coalition having reported the interception of four drones over Riyadh and the Eastern Province on October 17 and of two ballistic missiles fired towards Khamis Mushait on October 18. The coalition has stated that King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh was targeted 20 times in October alone, a campaign during which Riyadh proposed talks in Muscat that the movement refused, and which has led Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to ask parliament to authorise the defence of the kingdom. The movement made a similar claim on November 29, 2019, when Saree said a surface to air missile had downed a Saudi Apache near the border, which the coalition did not confirm at the time.

The National Guard ordered 24 AH-6i helicopters under a $234 million U.S. Army foreign military sales contract awarded to Boeing in August 2014, making it the launch customer for the export variant, with deliveries from the company’s plant in Mesa, Arizona, beginning in mid-2016. The type pairs a cockpit and mission computer derived from the AH-64 Apache with an L-3 Wescam MX-15Di sensor turret and laser designator, and can carry AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, 70 millimetre rockets, an M134 minigun and a GAU-19/B .50 calibre machine gun. A 2013 U.S. Army solicitation listed a planned National Guard fleet of 12 AH-64E Apaches, 24 AH-6i and 24 UH-60M Black Hawks based at Khashm Al-An. It is not the fleet’s first loss, with a National Guard AH-6i having crashed during training at Khashm Al-An near Riyadh on September 6, 2018, killing its American instructor and injuring the Saudi pilot under instruction.