The Houthis are inviting a US military intervention in Yemen.
On Saturday, at least a dozen people were killed in an attack on the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, where Mohammed bin Salman has a rather vexing dilemma on his hands.
The Saudis would rather not return to a state of full-on war with the Houthis at a time when the Kingdom’s at pains to protect critical infrastructure and avoid additional disruptions to energy exports.
But the Houthis’ lightning offensive, which saw the group capture a series of strategic coastal towns and an island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait last month, forced Yemen’s internationally-recognized government to launch a counter-offensive aimed at recapturing lost territory. The Saudis are conducting airstrikes in support of that push. The death toll from those strikes is nearing 100 Yemenis, most of them civilians.
The Houthis have cited those civilian deaths, and the Saudis’ penchant for haphazard targeting more generally, for a succession of attacks on the Kingdom’s airports in recent days. The world needs to “understand that airports, wedding ceremonies, hospitals and markets in Yemen must not be targeted,” the group said Saturday. If they are, “the same rules that apply to civilian facilities in Yemen must also apply to their counterparts everywhere else.”
In other words, it’s an eye for an eye. The Houthis intend to avenge civilian deaths in Yemen by killing civilians in Saudi Arabia.
Saturday’s melee at King Khalid International was the deadliest of this week’s airport attacks, but more important from a symbolic perspective, October 10 was the deadliest day for the Kingdom since the US and Israel assassinated the Iranian leadership earlier this year.
The Saudis have to respond. And they will. The question is how. Most likely, they’ll just continue to conduct airstrikes in solidarity with the ousted Yemeni government the Kingdom still hopes to restore. But it’s possible MBS is at the end of his rope with this and is prepared to escalate further.
Recall that Yemen’s civil war was effectively frozen for nearly four years following a 2022 truce. That ceasefire started to unravel in July after Saudi-backed forces bombed an airfield in Sanaa, where the IRGC was attempting to land a plane returning Houthi fighters from Iran, where they attended the funeral of Ali Khamenei.
Following that episode, the Houthis declared the truce null and void. “Their willingness to prevent flights from arriving or departing gives Yemen the right to strike their airports and to impose on them a siege,” a spokesperson said at the time. Fast forward three months and the gloves are well and truly off.
Although the US has provided logistical support for the Saudis’ recent bombing runs in Yemen, Donald Trump reportedly declined MBS’s request to join the strikes early last month. That, despite the Saudis joining US airstrikes on Iranian militia in Iraq over the summer.
Asked Saturday whether the US is now considering any new requests from MBS to join the fight against the Houthis, Trump said, “We may. We’re going to look at it.” Trump has of course bombed the Houthis before to no obvious avail. This time, though, the goals would be different.
Previously, the US conducted strikes to dissuade the Houthis from threatening freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. Joining the Saudi campaign in support of the effort to oust the Houthis, or at least reverse their recent territorial gains, would mark a new phase of American involvement.
“We just found out about the recent attack,” Trump went on, in the same remarks to reporters. “So we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly.”
Everyone watch their Signal requests for group chat invites. American flag icons and flexed bicep emojis here we come.
