Egypt Draws Two Lines: Force on Its Sudan Border and Unconditional Support for Saudi Arabia

Abdelatty’s interview came on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, three days after a Houthi missile struck King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 13 people and wounding more than 300. Arab News reported that he called Saudi national security “an integral part of Egypt’s national security”, said Egypt “cannot accept aggressions or attacks on Saudi territories”, and confirmed that Cairo is “seriously considering” joining the Makkah Defense Pact formed last month by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye (Turkey).

On the same day he telephoned Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and told him there was “no justification” for the strikes on the kingdom, according to the Egyptian foreign ministry.

The open phrase is the one that matters. Governments usually fence their pledges with conditions: within international law, in coordination with partners, through diplomatic channels. Abdelatty used none of them. When Bloomberg asked whether Egypt would get directly involved in Yemen, he spoke of “different kinds of solidarity and support”. He left the door open, and Tehran and the Houthis will have heard it.

The mood behind the pledge is just as clear. The Saudi broadcaster Al Arabiya, not an Egyptian channel, has praised the support Egyptians have shown Saudi citizens stranded in Cairo while flights into Riyadh are disrupted. Egyptians argue about everything, and many have criticised Saudi policy in the past. Today there is no Egyptian camp against Saudi Arabia. Criticism can wait until the war is over. While it lasts, Egypt is at Saudi Arabia’s back.

On Saturday 10 October, air strikes hit an artisanal gold-mining site at Jabal al-Uqaydat, a mountainous area on the undemarcated line between Egypt and Sudan. Sudan’s Emergency Lawyers group blamed the Egyptian air force and said at least 72 miners were killed, according to Al Jazeera; other Sudanese counts were lower, and none has been independently verified.

Egypt did not claim the strikes directly. On Monday its military said the armed forces and police were conducting a campaign to “impose full sovereignty within the borders of the Egyptian state” against “criminal elements” engaged in illegal mining, that warning flyers had been dropped before the operation, and that people should not be swayed by “misleading rumours and foreign agendas”, AFP reported. In June the army said it had acted “within Egyptian territory” at the same site and detained 223 people. Sudan’s leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has ordered a fact-finding committee.

The story is being told three ways: that Egyptian jets struck deep inside Sudan, that they struck on the border, or that they struck inside Egypt. Each version has its witnesses. Logic settles most of the dispute. Egypt has no reason to bomb the Sudanese interior: if prospectors want to dig in Sudan, that is Sudan’s business. The problem is that they came north. For years, gold seekers have crossed the long, thinly policed southern frontier into the Eastern Desert, where the deposits run from the border towards the Red Sea coast. What began as a few Sudanese experts hired by Egyptian families during the early months of Sudan’s war has grown into camps, tents, relatives and relatives of relatives.

Most coverage misses this. A few hundred people crossing a border in search of work is migration. Thousands of organised men setting up camps on your territory and stripping your gold is something else. It is closer to an army than to a migrant flow, and it overwhelmed what local police could manage. Spain knows what a sudden human surge looks like. This is that surge, with picks and generators, in a remote desert.

Egypt dropped flyers first, telling the prospectors to leave the border zone. When the camps stayed, it struck. A state that warns and then enforces its border, in a place its police can no longer reach, is doing its job.

There is also the question of who profits. Gold dug on that border is smuggled and sold outside any state’s books, and Sudan’s illicit gold trade has long helped finance the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary fighting Sudan’s army. The people stripping the Egyptian side answer to no legitimate authority. A former commander of Egypt’s Second Field Army argued this week that many of the miners are not Sudanese at all but come from Nigeria and Uganda. Whoever they are, they are not Egypt’s guests.

The days since have been tense. On Monday a gunman killed two Egyptian truck drivers and wounded a third at a market in Khartoum; AFP said the motive was unclear. Sudan has promised an inquiry. Egypt should cooperate with it, but it owes no apology for defending its territory. Organised theft of a country’s resources gets one answer, and Egypt gave it.

The tie between Egypt and Saudi Arabia is older than this war and runs deeper than any single government. The two countries face each other across the Red Sea, and both depend on the same narrow southern gate, the Bab al-Mandab strait, which the Houthis can threaten from Yemen’s coast. Every ship that turns away from the Red Sea is a ship that does not pay Suez Canal tolls; President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has put Egypt’s losses from regional instability at about $20 billion in canal revenue.

Egypt joined the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen in 2015, deploying naval units to secure the strait. Saudi Arabia, in turn, is one of Egypt’s largest investors and lenders, and it hosts one of the biggest Egyptian communities abroad. Gulf money keeps Egypt’s economy afloat: Qatar’s $7.5 billion Alam El Roum project, the UAE’s $35 billion Ras El Hekma deal and a $10 billion Saudi deposit at Egypt’s central bank.

The Houthis are not only Riyadh’s problem. A Houthi movement that can close Riyadh’s airport and strike Aramco is a Houthi movement that can choke the Suez Canal. That is why Cairo calls Saudi security part of its own, and why “whatever is asked” is a promise Egypt can keep.

The pressure on the kingdom is real. Houthi missiles and drones have struck King Khalid International Airport three times in a week. On Tuesday the Houthis hit Aramco’s Dhahran complex, and fragments of an intercepted missile injured four people in Riyadh and damaged 15 homes. On Wednesday the Saudi-led coalition struck Houthi energy terminals and fuel stores in Yemen, and a cruise missile was intercepted over Al-Kharj in Riyadh province, Al Jazeera reported. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is moving between fortified palaces and that the kingdom is short of interceptors, according to The New Arab. The shortage has a simple cause: Iran has fired more than 1,000 missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia since the Iran war began, and the Houthis have kept going since.

The Houthis are aiming at the capital for a reason. Riyadh is the seat of power and the venue for the Future Investment Initiative, the conference known as “Davos in the Desert”, due on 26 October. Closing the airport is an attempt to empty that hall.

Commentators have built a tidy story from these facts: Saudi Arabia cannot go into Yemen on the ground, because it would never get out, as Russia found in Ukraine; it cannot rely on Syrian fighters; air strikes alone have not broken the Houthis. It leaves out the most important fact: Saudi Arabia has not surrendered.

When Iran’s foreign minister called his Saudi counterpart on 11 October and offered to broker talks with “Yemen”, Riyadh did not take the exit. As we argued, Iran’s mediation offer was a trap, and refusing it was right. A country that believes it is losing grabs the first lifeline. A country that refuses one has options no one else has seen. Iran is betting on the Saudi home front: that if the leadership will not bend, the public will. That bet is wrong. Saudi Arabia spent about $82 billion on defence last year. It has blood to answer for now, and its response, when it comes, will be far heavier than its critics expect.

Former US intelligence officer Chuck DeVore made a related point in his interview with Silent Dossier: Riyadh can push back the Houthis without American jets.

Nobody should expect a quick end. The war in Yemen is a war of attrition, and the side that suffers losses it cannot recover from will be the side that gives in. The ground picture is serious: the Houthis cut the road between Taiz and Aden in early October, security sources told AFP. If Taiz falls, the Houthis gain a springboard towards Aden, and government forces that advanced towards the Bab al-Mandab could be cut off. Aidarous al-Zubaidi, the southern leader, has announced a general mobilisation to meet that threat.

That is why Egypt’s pledge matters. A war of attrition is won by the side with deeper reserves of money, men and allies. Saudi Arabia has the money. Egypt has the largest army in the Arab world, and it has said, in public, that it will answer whatever Riyadh asks.

Egypt is not making these choices from comfort. Its external debt is heavy and the war in the Gulf touches every source of foreign currency it has. Yet the pound has held around 53 to the dollar, when banks and rating agencies such as S&P and Fitch had forecast 56 to 58 by the end of the year.

The reasons are concrete. Remittances from Egyptians abroad reached a record $33.9 billion in the first eight months of 2026, up 27 percent on a year earlier, the central bank said, as Egyptians in Europe and the Gulf send savings home and more transfers move through banks. Foreign investors have returned to Egyptian debt for the yield, and property sales to foreigners have brought in dollars. None of this solves Egypt’s debt problem. It does mean Cairo can stand by Riyadh without its currency collapsing under it.