Houthis Claim a Missile and Drone Strike on Aramco in Riyadh
The Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group struck Aramco in Riyadh with ballistic missiles and drones, calling the strikes “precise and direct” and saying they “led to fires breaking out”. Smoke and fire were seen near an Aramco facility south of the capital on Saturday. Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, called the claim “misleading”. Saudi authorities have not confirmed any damage.
Reaching Riyadh is the escalation. The Houthis said last month they had hit Aramco facilities at Yanbu, and Saudi Arabia said it intercepted six ballistic missiles fired towards Taif and Yanbu without damage; the coalition says a power station at Medina was hit on Tuesday. A claimed strike on the capital changes the calculation for a kingdom that has spent the week preparing a ground offensive. Mr al-Maliki said the Houthis were “attempting to divert attention from the scale of the losses and the growing public anger against them”, and that what they face around Taiz drives them to “seek illusory victories”. The ledger on the other side is equally one-sided and equally unverified: government forces claimed 257 targeting operations and at least 700 Houthi fighters killed on Saturday, and early on Sunday the coalition claimed 97 more operations on the Tor al-Baha front and the Taiz axis, against at least 260 fighters, with 44 vehicles destroyed or disabled. None of these figures has been independently checked, and no side gives its own losses. The war resumed when the 2022 truce collapsed in July; the Houthis took Mocha and islands in Bab el-Mandeb in mid-September. Watch whether Aramco reports any outage, because that is the only number in this story a market will price.