Houthis Kill a Saudia Pilot in Riyadh, and Saudi Arabia Readies Its Ground Offensive

The first reason is that the Saudi oil system has proved harder to break than the Houthis expected. The East-West pipeline, which carries crude across the kingdom to the Red Sea, was struck twice in a month: first by drones launched from Iraq in September, which Riyadh blamed on Iraqi militias, then in an attack on a pumping station that the Houthis claimed. Each time it came back. After the first strike, pumping resumed within about 11 days, not the months some analysts had predicted, and on October 6 Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said flow was back to 5.8 million barrels a day. A campaign built on hurting Saudi exports was not working.

The second reason is that the Houthis are being hurt, and they are answering pain with escalation. Their bet has always been simple: cheap missiles and drones against precious targets, again and again, until the richer side decides the war costs too much and gives up. When oil facilities stopped delivering that result, they moved to targets that frighten ordinary people and foreign airlines. Killing civilians is not a sign of strength. It is what a group does when its arsenal is being dismantled and it needs to show it can still draw blood.

The Saudi air campaign has a clear priority, and it is not only Houthi supply lines. An Israeli open-source analyst who maps military activity around Israel’s neighbours has charted Saudi strikes on cave and tunnel complexes in the mountains around Sanaa, which serve as Houthi ballistic-missile stores. The Institute for the Study of War confirms the pattern: Saudi Arabia has struck “ballistic missile launchers, depots, and radar sites in Sanaa, Amran, and Saada”, the three provinces at the heart of Houthi territory.

The coalition’s own announcements show the scale. Around October 6 its spokesman, Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki, said it had destroyed a depot housing 20 ballistic missiles at a mountain site in Saada. On October 7 it listed 11 ballistic-missile storage facilities in Saada among 82 targets hit. Within a single week, Saudi aircraft had struck at least eight Houthi missile stores.

Many of these are the same complexes that US aircraft bombed during Washington’s campaign against the Houthis in the spring of 2025. The American strikes collapsed the entrances and exits. Once that campaign ended, the Houthis dug them out, enlarged them and hardened them, investing heavily in the stockpile they now fire at Saudi Arabia. Saudi jets are now hitting those same sites hard and sealing their openings again.

There is a reason for this focus. Saudi air defences have struggled, and Riyadh is not relying on imported interceptors alone. Every ballistic missile destroyed in a cave is one that never has to be shot down over Riyadh. If the Houthis lose most of their ballistic stock, they are left with drones, which are slower, easier to intercept and far less dangerous.

Little of this appears in the news, and the reason is practical. No independent reporter can walk into a Houthi missile cave in Saada and count the wreckage, and the Houthis do not allow their losses to be filmed. The best evidence of how much the Saudi strikes hurt is the Houthi response: a group that was content to hit oil sites is now firing at airports and killing civilians.

This is also a different Saudi war from the one fought between 2015 and 2022. This time the Saudi target bank is full. Riyadh has gathered intelligence on the Houthis from Egypt, Türkiye (Turkey), Pakistan and anyone else with something to offer, on top of its own long-running intelligence work inside Yemen. About 200 US military advisers, CNN reported in September, are giving Saudi forces intelligence and geospatial targeting support without taking part in strikes. Their contribution shows in the precision of the target list.

On the ground, the front looks frozen, but it is not quiet. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Houthis are reinforcing the Red Sea coastal plain against a government offensive toward the port of Mokha, which they seized during their September advance. Whether that offensive stops at Mokha or pushes on toward Sanaa and ground the Houthis have never lost is the question that will define the next phase of the war.

Both sides are playing the same game. The Houthis want Taiz, the government-held city in Yemen’s southwest, because its roads feed the government forces pushing toward Mokha. Take Taiz and the government’s logistics collapse. The government wants Mokha, because Mokha is the Houthis’ main supply route down the coast toward Taiz. Take Mokha and the Houthi forces around Taiz are cut off.

Around Taiz, the Houthis claim more than the ground supports. They have repeatedly tried to seize the Taiz–Aden road, the most important artery in the south, and the road remains contested rather than lost. Those assaults have cost the Houthis heavily in men. Meanwhile, government forces near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait have been moving forward. The Saudi-backed Homeland Shield Forces have taken control of the Jabal Kahbub front, the mountains that overlook the Red Sea. That high ground has to be secured before any drive on Mokha, because whoever holds it can see and strike the coastal road.

In every one of these battles, the decisive player is the Saudi air force. It is hitting Houthi depots, cutting the roads that feed Houthi units around Taiz, and covering government troops. On October 9 al-Maliki announced that the coalition had destroyed 136 military targets in Houthi-held areas, was giving Yemeni forces round-the-clock air support and was working to dismantle the Houthis’ ballistic-missile network. On October 10 the coalition announced a wide-scale operation.

The battles so far are not the main offensive. That is still being prepared, and every side is racing to be ready for it. The clearest sign of its scale came from Axios on October 7: at Saudi Arabia’s request, Syria is considering sending 10,000 to 20,000 troops to support Yemen’s government forces, drawn from two army divisions, one of which includes former fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. A Syrian presidential adviser has called the reports baseless, and President Ahmed al-Sharaa has not announced a decision. But the request alone shows what Riyadh is planning: not a holding action, but an assault big enough to break the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia is not fighting alone. Pakistan and Türkiye have moved troops into the kingdom under their defence pact with Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has managed to build and lead a coalition, and to avoid the mistakes the United States made in its own war on Iran.

The Houthis tell a story in which Saudi Arabia started this war. On July 13, Saudi and Yemeni government strikes hit the runway at Sanaa airport to stop an Iranian Mahan Air plane from landing. The Houthis say it was bringing home their delegation from the funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, killed in February, along with patients and stranded citizens. That account is false. According to reporting summarised by the Council on Foreign Relations, Revolutionary Guard advisers and equipment were reportedly aboard. Direct flights from Iran into Sanaa were what the arrangement with the Houthis ruled out, and the Houthis broke it. Saudi Arabia reacted. It did not act first.

The war was forced on the kingdom, in its timing and in its form. And a war that has been forced on you has no easy exit. There is no mediator either side trusts, and both are determined to fight to the end. The Houthis believe they can keep advancing, and that a steady rain of cheap weapons on expensive targets will eventually make Riyadh give in. Saudi Arabia’s answer is that its blood has now been spilled, and it will be avenged.

That is why the coming offensive is inevitable. Before the airport attacks there was still a window for negotiation, despite everything the kingdom had suffered. A Saudia pilot killed on duty at the capital’s airport closes it. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman cannot negotiate now, and he cannot try to calm the front. He has to escalate, and he will. Escalation carries real risk, and the blows Saudi Arabia is taking are painful. But everything seen so far, the losses, the disrupted flights, the strain on the economy, is only the beginning of the reckoning.

Behind the Houthis stands Iran. For decades Tehran called the United States and Israel the “Great Satan”. In this war, Iran has earned the title for itself.

Iran’s theory of victory is endurance. It has survived the US and Israeli war that began in February and the American naval blockade that followed, and it believes that surviving any future American attack while gaining control of the Bab el-Mandeb would make it a great power: master of the two most important straits in the Middle East, Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, able to choke Gulf oil and besiege Saudi Arabia. Through the Houthis, Iran strikes the kingdom without firing a single bullet itself, punishing Riyadh for its alliance with Washington while Iranian officials applaud from a distance.

This is not the conduct of an innocent state. Saudi Arabia played no part in attacking Iran. It closed its airspace to American aircraft heading for Iranian targets. Yet when Iran was struck, it hit back at Gulf states that had nothing to do with the attack. Now it has carried the war deep into Saudi Arabia through its proxy, with one message: if Iran is hit, the Saudis will be hit too. That is the behaviour of a criminal state that would rather set the region on fire than fall alone.

Iran’s own economy shows how it survives the pressure. The rial now trades at around 1.8 million to the dollar at the official rate and well above two million on the open market, a collapse almost without precedent. Yet Iranians have not risen against the government. Fear of the security forces is part of the reason, but not all of it. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has run on a shadow economy: front companies that move hard currency into the country, smuggling networks that sell its oil, and channels that bring in medicine and almost anything else it needs. As long as those channels work, enough people can get by.

The pressure on Saudi Arabia will grow. Israel is preparing to strike Iran again. On October 8 President Donald Trump said the United States would not attack Iran before the November midterm elections, but Israeli political and media circles close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expect fighting with Iran to resume within weeks, and Israel’s Channel 12 reported that US officers told the Israeli military chief to prepare for a major attack within three weeks.

If that war returns, Saudi Arabia will be fighting on two fronts at once. Iran will answer every Saudi strike on the Houthis with strikes on the kingdom, claiming it is only hitting American targets when it is not. In truth Saudi Arabia is already fighting on three fronts: Yemen, Iran and Iraq, where Iran-backed militias have fired dozens of drones at the kingdom. The kingdom has never been in this position before, and it is holding.