Pakistani Forces Are in Saudi Arabia, and Three Die at Two Airports
“The forces of Pakistan are already there,” the chief of the Pakistani military’s media wing has confirmed, declining to give numbers. It follows a mutual defence treaty signed with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Houthi missile and drone strikes killed two at Abha airport and one at King Khalid in Riyadh, wounding thirty-six.
Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry gave the confirmation in an interview, treating numbers and capabilities as classified. A nuclear-armed state has put soldiers on Saudi soil in a war Britain sits adjacent to through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz; that is a structural change in Gulf security rather than another day of exchanges. The casualties come from Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation: two women, a Moroccan and an Algerian, killed with twenty-eight wounded at Abha International near the Yemeni border, and a Sudanese national killed with eight wounded at King Khalid International in Riyadh, on 6 and 7 October. The Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed both, calling them a response to sixty Saudi air strikes and missile attacks in twenty-four hours, and also claimed a strike on Aden International. The Saudi-led coalition said the attacks “will not go unpunished” and reported strikes on more than eighty Houthi military sites in Saada, Al Hudaydah, Al Jawf and Ma’rib. The American mission in Saudi Arabia has issued an updated security alert warning the conflict “has the potential to escalate”. António Guterres condemned the cross-border attacks and said he was deeply concerned by the sharp escalation. The United Nations now counts more than 200,000 people displaced by the fighting in Yemen.