Saudi-led coalition intercepts Houthi missile launched towards Riyadh

The Saudi-led coalition says it intercepted and destroyed a Houthi ballistic missile launched towards Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, as the Yemeni armed group said it carried out more attacks on the kingdom.

Coalition spokesman Major-General Turki al-Maliki on Wednesday announced the thwarted attack on X, days after two separate strikes hit Riyadh’s King Khalid international airport, killing 14 people and injuring hundreds.

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The General Directorate of Saudi Civil Defence also issued two alerts through its national early warning platform, later saying the danger had passed. One alert was for the Al-Kharj governorate in Riyadh province, and the other for the capital.

The Houthis, an armed group also known as Ansar Allah (Arabic for supporters of God), issued a statement saying they targeted facilities of Saudi ⁠⁠Arabia’s national oil company Aramco in Dhahran, an Aramco refinery in Riyadh, and the capital’s King Khalid international ‌‌airport.

Overnight, the Saudi Ministry of Energy confirmed that the administrative building belonging to Aramco in Dhahran was hit.

Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from the Qatari capital Doha, said any notion that the Saudi-led coalition could contain the conflict to Yemen had been shattered over the last 10 days, which saw the targeting of several sites in Saudi Arabia.

Houthi attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid international airport over the weekend killed 14 people and wounded more than 300 others. Houthi attacks have also been reported on other airports, including the Abha international airport, where two people were killed, and on Aramco facilities.

Meanwhile, Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces have launched a counteroffensive in Yemen to retake coastal territory from the Houthis near the Bab al-Mandeb strait at the entrance to the Red Sea, a vital maritime trade chokepoint.

Fighting in Yemen between the Iran-aligned Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces escalated sharply last month, shattering a United Nations-brokered ceasefire that had largely held since 2022.

The Houthis have controlled Yemen’s most populous areas, including the capital Sanaa, since seizing the city in 2014, forcing the internationally recognised government to flee to southern Yemen.

The Muslim World League on Wednesday condemned the continued Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, saying they deliberately target civilians and civilian sites. The league’s secretary-general, Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, said their nature confirms “the criminal approach of this terrorist militia in deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure”.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthi-affiliated Al-Masirah television reported that four air strikes hit the Harib district in the country’s Marib governorate. The results of the attacks were not immediately clear.

Nawaf Obaid, a security and intelligence analyst and senior research fellow at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that while air strikes are intensifying, the “actual ground war hasn’t really begun” for the Saudi-led coalition.

Obaid broke down the phases in which such an operation could unfold, saying the first phase would be “to hit at basically the power and the energy source that’s allowing the Houthis to operate … tanks, armoured vehicles, trucks”.

Phase two would be to look at the “systematic increase of Houthi control in the region, which is critical,” he said.

Phase three would involve a discussion on how “to start taking back these territories that the Houthis have gained since the beginning of the war”.

Obaid said these “multipronged phases” would include “extra-specialised” troops, especially in mountain warfare, because the Houthis are taking the battlefield into difficult terrain.