Some of the passengers at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport on the Saturday before last were pilgrims wrapped in the white cloth of ihram, headed for Mecca. A Houthi strike hit the airport that day and killed at least thirteen people. Saudi media said one of the dead was a Bangladeshi imam who had been travelling with a group of pilgrims. By the end of the week the Saudi-led coalition had counted seventeen people killed and 333 wounded at the Riyadh airport alone, across twenty separate attacks since the start of October. Two more died at Abha airport in the south. The capital’s main airport stayed shut for days and only started reopening this weekend.
Reuters reported last Wednesday that the kingdom’s public missile warning system had gone quiet before the deadliest of those strikes. Two Western officials told the agency that Saudi authorities had found the alerts disruptive, and that citizens had complained about being woken up at night. The government has not explained why the sirens stopped.
This is the country Mohammed bin Salman promised the world’s investors. Vision 2030 was supposed to give Saudi Arabia film festivals, desert resorts, a new airline, a futuristic city on the Red Sea and a quiet border, so the kingdom could make its money from something other than crude. Instead, earlier this month, Houthi missiles set fire to an Aramco refinery south of Riyadh. They have fired on the Rabigh refinery near Mecca, on the air base at Khamis Mushait, on Najran and Jizan, and on a power station in Medina. Bin Salman asked Donald Trump to bomb the Houthis back in September. Trump said no. Washington gives the Saudis intelligence and targeting help, according to Reuters and Axios, while refusing to fly the air campaign.
Bin Salman has spent ten years taking everything in Saudi Arabia that once had its own authority—the clergy, the founding story, the women’s movement, the princes and the money—and putting it under his own name. He tried the same method on Yemen with cash, clients and bombs. That method has failed where it was always going to fail, and the bill is landing on Riyadh’s runways.
Saudi Arabia marked its first Founding Day in February 2022. The new holiday dates the state to 1727, when Muhammad bin Saud took power in the oasis town of Diriyah, seventeen years before he made his famous pact with the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Moving the birthday moved the clergy out of the founding story. Kristin Diwan of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington told Reuters at the time that the new history tied Saudis directly to the ruling family. The dynasty no longer needed preachers to explain why it ruled.
In April 2016, a year before he became crown prince, the cabinet stripped the religious police of the power to chase, question or arrest anyone. Women won the right to drive in June 2018. A year later women over twenty-one could get passports and travel without a male guardian’s permission. Cinemas opened and concerts filled stadiums. These were real changes in real lives. Calling them an attack on Islam repeats the religious police’s own claim that their patrols and canes were the faith itself.
Bin Salman sold all of it as a homecoming. At an investment conference in Riyadh in October 2017 he blamed the kingdom’s harshness on what came after 1979, the year of Iran’s revolution and the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and he promised a return to a moderate Islam open to the world. The story let the state reverse four decades of its own policy without admitting that the people who enforced that policy, and the royal family that paid them, owed anyone an explanation.
The Basic Law of 1992 still names the Quran and the Sunnah as the constitution. The Personal Status Law of 2022 wrote male guardianship over marriage into statute, according to Human Rights Watch. Vision 2030’s own brochures call custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques a duty to Muslims everywhere and promise to host thirty million umrah pilgrims a year. Bin Salman stripped the clergy of the ability to speak for that Islamic identity without him. The faith stays on the flag, while the right to interpret it sits in one office.
Salman al-Ouda had more than thirteen million followers online when state security came for him in September 2017, during the first summer of the blockade of Qatar. A relative told Human Rights Watch that the government had wanted Ouda to post a message backing the blockade. He posted a prayer instead, asking God to bring the hearts of the two peoples together. Prosecutors later asked for his execution on thirty-seven charges, almost all concerning things he had said, people he knew and opinions he held.
Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef and Eman al-Nafjan had spent years campaigning for women to drive. Police arrested them in May 2018, a few weeks before the ban was lifted. Human Rights Watch later documented allegations that detained women activists were tortured, given electric shocks and sexually harassed in custody. The state handed out the reform and jailed the women who had asked for it. Every Saudi could read the message that rights come from the crown prince, and asking for them first is a crime.
The same instinct shapes how the palace sees Yemen. In Riyadh’s eyes, a cleric with his own audience, a women’s movement with its own programme and a neighbouring country with its own politics all hold authority that doesn’t come from the palace. At home bin Salman could crush that. Next door he has spent eleven years finding out he can’t.
Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is much older than bin Salman. In the spring of 1934 Abdulaziz ibn Saud sent his sons south against Imam Yahya. Prince Faisal’s army took the Red Sea port of Hodeidah. The Treaty of Taif that ended the war left Asir, Jizan and Najran inside Saudi Arabia, the same provinces the Houthis are firing into this month. The border itself was only fixed in the Treaty of Jeddah in 2000.
When army officers overthrew the Zaydi imam in Sanaa in September 1962, the House of Saud backed the imam. For most of the next eight years Riyadh armed and paid royalist tribes fighting the new republic and the Egyptian troops Gamal Abdel Nasser sent to defend it. A US Defense Department historical study records Saudi support for Imam Muhammad al-Badr through that war. The kingdom that now says it is saving Yemen from a Zaydi hereditary claim once spent a fortune trying to restore one, driven by the unchanging goal of preventing a strong, independent power on its southern border.
For decades a body known as the Special Committee, run out of the defence ministry by Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, kept Yemeni sheikhs, generals and politicians on monthly stipends. Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled North Yemen from 1978 and the unified country from 1990, learned to play that system better than anyone. A Reuters investigation in 2016 found that Saudi Arabia’s Yemeni patronage networks frayed as Sultan’s health failed in the years before his death in 2011. Riyadh went into its biggest war with the machine that had managed Yemen for half a century already rusting.
Muqbil al-Wadi’i came from the Saada region in Yemen’s far north. He studied in Saudi Arabia, was expelled around 1979, and came home to open a Salafi school called Dar al-Hadith in the village of Dammaj, a few miles outside Saada city, putting an ultra-conservative Sunni seminary in the heart of Zaydi country. Students came from across the Muslim world. Saudi-funded preachers spread through the north, and their pamphlets described Zaydis as heretics and as pawns of Iran.
Zaydi imams had ruled the northern highlands, on and off, for about a thousand years before 1962. After the revolution many Zaydis, and especially the sayyid families who claim descent from the Prophet, were pushed to the margins of a republic run by Saleh’s tribal and military allies. In the early 1990s a group called the Believing Youth formed in Saada, led by Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, the son of a senior Zaydi scholar. Anna Gordon and Sarah Parkinson of Johns Hopkins describe the movement as a reaction against both the government’s neglect of the north and the spread of Saudi-funded Salafism in Saada. Hussein al-Houthi borrowed his slogan—”Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—from Iran’s revolution, and his followers began shouting it in mosques after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Saleh’s army killed Hussein al-Houthi in September 2004. Six rounds of war followed in Saada between 2004 and 2010. Saleh’s government told Washington that the Houthis were Iran’s agents, then Hezbollah’s partners, then al-Qaeda’s allies. American diplomats in Sanaa didn’t believe it. An embassy cable from November 2009, later published by WikiLeaks, said the Yemeni claims about Hezbollah lacked any factual foundation. A Carnegie Endowment report the next year said Sanaa had produced no evidence of outside military help to the rebels.
In November 2009 Saudi Arabia joined the sixth war. Houthi fighters crossed onto Jabal al-Dukhan, a mountain that straddles the border in Jizan, and killed a Saudi border guard. Saudi jets and artillery pounded the area for weeks, and Riyadh admitted 133 of its soldiers were killed. The best-funded military in the Arab world spent three months fighting a rebel militia over one mountain, and the Houthis came out of it with a reputation for standing up to the Saudis. Thomas Juneau, who teaches at the University of Ottawa, later noted an American diplomatic warning from those years that foreign campaigns against the Houthis would push them to seek Iran’s help.
Yemenis filled Change Square in Sanaa in February 2011. Students, tribesmen, Islah party members, socialists and young Houthis camped side by side and demanded that Saleh go. Security forces and pro-government gunmen killed about 270 protesters and bystanders that year, according to Human Rights Watch. In November the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by Riyadh and backed by Washington and the European Union, offered Saleh a deal handing power to his deputy, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, in exchange for immunity from prosecution for Saleh and his men. Yemen’s parliament passed the amnesty in January 2012. Hadi then won an election in which he was the only candidate.
The National Dialogue that followed produced real proposals on transitional justice, women’s rights and federalism, while leaving Saleh in Sanaa with his money, his party and the loyalty of much of the army. Having fought six wars against the Houthis, Saleh joined them in 2014. On September 21 that year Houthi fighters walked into the capital, helped by army units that answered to Saleh rather than to Hadi. Hadi resigned in January 2015, slipped away to Aden, took back his resignation and then fled to Riyadh.
The immunity deal came before bin Salman’s rise. His father became king in January 2015 and made him defence minister the same week. Bin Salman inherited a Saudi habit of running Yemen through elite bargains and paid clients, and of preferring a managed succession to a revolution that Yemenis led themselves. His own contribution was the war.
Operation Decisive Storm began on March 26, 2015, when bin Salman was twenty-nine. The stated goal was to push back the Houthis and put Hadi back in Sanaa within weeks. Barack Obama’s White House had announced logistical and intelligence support the day before and set up a joint planning cell with the Saudis. American tankers refuelled Saudi jets, and American and British companies sold the bombs.
Reuters reported in April 2016 that Saudi forces were short of basic battlefield intelligence and leaning too heavily on whatever Yemeni allies told them. In October 2016 a coalition strike hit a funeral hall in Sanaa and killed more than a hundred mourners, an attack Human Rights Watch called an apparent war crime. That December the Obama administration held back one planned sale of precision munitions and kept the refuelling going. For years, Washington complained in public and kept supplying in private.
Saleh switched sides one last time in December 2017. He went on Saudi-funded television and offered to turn the page with Riyadh if the blockade was lifted. The Houthis killed him the next day outside Sanaa. The Saudis had bet on Saleh for four decades and he died their ally of barely a day.
In September 2019 drones and cruise missiles hit Aramco’s processing plant at Abqaiq and the Khurais oil field, knocking out about half of Saudi crude output for a time. The Houthis claimed the attack, Washington said it came from Iran, and Trump did nothing. Bin Salman learned that year that the American umbrella had holes in it.
The United Nations Development Programme estimated in 2021 that the war would cause about 377,000 deaths by the end of that year. Most of them came from hunger, disease and the collapse of clinics and water systems rather than from bombs and bullets, and most of the dead were small children. Both the coalition’s blockade and bombing and the Houthis—who besieged Taiz for years and taxed food coming into their territory—drove the toll. The poorest people on the Arabian Peninsula paid the price, while the arms companies that supplied the war posted record sales.
Iran’s help to the Houthis was modest when the bombing started. Juneau argued in International Affairs in 2016 that Tehran’s support had been limited and that the Saudi campaign was deepening the relationship it claimed to be fighting. In Gordon and Parkinson’s account, the Iranian connection began as a story Saleh invented to win American support, and the war turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By 2024 UN experts were describing an unprecedented flow of weapons, components, money and training to the Houthis from Iran’s Quds Force, Hezbollah and networks around them. The Houthis went from firing old Scuds left over from Saleh’s arsenal to building drones and ballistic missiles that can reach Riyadh and Eilat. Last month two Iranian sources told Reuters that Tehran had told the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia and had promised them more money and weapons. An Iranian official answered that Tehran does not control the group. Both statements fit the facts: Iran pays for the missiles and the engineers, while the Houthis choose their own targets and ambitions. Allison Minor, the former American deputy envoy for Yemen, has warned that those ambitions make them more dangerous than a proxy. Iran’s bill runs to some hundreds of millions of dollars a year; Saudi Arabia’s war has cost it hundreds of billions.
Popular accounts often misread the religion. Zaydis don’t believe in the hidden twelfth imam that Iran’s Twelver clergy await, and Zaydi law has long sat close to the Shafi’i school that most Sunni Yemenis follow. Before 2015 most Yemenis didn’t even use the words Sunni and Shia about themselves. Still, the Houthi leadership has borrowed heavily from Iran’s revolutionary style, adopting the slogan, the martyr posters, the mass rallies and the cult of the leader around Abdulmalik al-Houthi, Hussein’s younger brother. Scholars still argue over whether that amounts to a doctrinal drift toward Twelver Shiism, though the political drift is plain. The Houthis built a state in the image of the Islamic Republic and armed it with Iran’s weapons, while Riyadh spent the same years bombing the country and calling every Zaydi an Iranian.
The Houthis call their movement Ansar Allah, the supporters of God, and govern around two-thirds of Yemen’s people through a security service that disappears its critics. Human Rights Watch has documented arbitrary detention, torture and political trials of opponents across Houthi territory. In June, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies said seventy-three UN employees and dozens of other aid workers—all of them Yemenis—were still being held by the Houthis as of February.
Last September Houthi police arrested dozens of people for celebrating September 26, the anniversary of the 1962 revolution, sending Yemenis to jail for marking the end of hereditary religious rule. The Sana’a Center has documented how the Houthis revived khums, a one-fifth levy on natural resources, and steered part of it to Hashemite families who claim descent from the Prophet. Its study of judicial changes in 2024 found the movement concentrating the courts in the hands of men from that same social stratum.
Rule by bloodline also cuts against the Quran’s instruction that believers settle their affairs by shura, by consultation. Saudi Arabia’s own Basic Law lists justice, consultation and equality as foundations of government, yet a family that named the country after itself and passes the throne between brothers and sons cannot claim the high ground over a family that says God chose it. Yemenis are entitled to reject both. Nothing in the Houthis’ crimes gives anyone licence to treat Zaydis, Hashemites or the millions of Yemenis who live under Houthi rule as collectively guilty.
By 2022 bin Salman wanted out of Yemen. That March, Houthi drones set an Aramco fuel depot in Jeddah on fire during the Formula One race weekend. A UN-brokered truce took effect in April and mostly held. Mohammed Al Jaber, the Saudi ambassador to Yemen, flew to Sanaa in April 2023 and sat down with Houthi leaders, and that September a Houthi delegation came to Riyadh for the first time since the war began. In December 2023 the UN envoy, Hans Grundberg, announced that the two sides had committed to a roadmap promising a nationwide ceasefire, public salaries paid in Houthi areas with Saudi money, roads reopened into besieged Taiz, oil exports restarted and easier access through Sanaa airport and Hodeidah port.
The roadmap was a Saudi-Houthi bargain with the rest of Yemen watching from the side. The Southern Transitional Council objected to southern oil money paying Houthi civil servants. Then the Houthis began attacking ships in the Red Sea in November 2023 in the name of Gaza. Washington put them back on its terrorism lists, and paying their employees became a sanctions problem for Riyadh. Mohammad Abdulsalam, the Houthi spokesman, complained again this weekend that the Saudis never answered the proposals his side sent in June to revive that roadmap.
Late last year the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council seized Hadramawt and Mahra in a matter of days and briefly controlled most of the old South Yemen. Saudi Arabia answered with airstrikes on forces its own coalition partner had armed. On December 30, Rashad al-Alimi, the head of the Presidential Leadership Council, gave the Emiratis twenty-four hours to leave Yemen, and they left. Saudi-backed troops retook Mukalla in early January, and Aden fell to them on January 7. Aidarus al-Zubaidi, the STC leader, fled to Abu Dhabi. Riyadh announced that the STC had dissolved; a week later, tens of thousands of southerners rallied in Aden to say it hadn’t.
With the northern front thinned out and Emirati troops gone from the Red Sea islands, longtime Yemen analyst Susanne Dahlgren noted that the Houthis didn’t move, reading it as a sign of a quiet Saudi understanding with Sanaa. In May the two sides swapped more than 1,600 prisoners, the biggest exchange of the war. Riyadh looked as if it was preparing a partition—the Houthis in the north, a Saudi-managed south, and, according to leaked reports in March, committees studying a Saudi oil pipeline across Yemeni territory to the Arabian Sea.
The American and Israeli war on Iran started at the end of February. Hormuz was effectively shut for months, and Saudi Arabia pushed its oil west through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu and other Red Sea terminals, making the Red Sea the kingdom’s lifeline right next to Houthi territory.
On July 20 the Houthis announced a maritime ban on Saudi Arabia, after tit-for-tat strikes on Sanaa airport and Abha airport. On September 3 they opened an offensive on Yemen’s west coast from western Taiz, southern Hodeidah and Mokha at once, taking the heights west of Taiz before running down the coast through Hays and Khokha. By the night of September 9 they held a major camp in the foothills east of Mokha. On the morning of September 10, Tareq Saleh’s National Resistance, the Giants Brigades and the Saudi-funded Nation’s Shield forces pulled out of the town before the Houthis even arrived. The Houthis kept going to Dhubab and Perim Island in the mouth of Bab al-Mandeb, while Tareq Saleh, the late president’s nephew who had once fought on the Houthi side, flew to Riyadh.
Mokha fell in under two days because of divided command, distrust between allied militias and a patron that paid for everything and controlled none of it. Three forces with three different histories and three sets of sponsors held the coast with no single commander. Later reporting said the Houthis had broken into the National Resistance’s internal communications and listened to its field commanders. Tareq Saleh had warned weeks earlier that the Houthis were heading for the strait, according to the New York Times, yet nobody in the coalition moved to reinforce the coast.
Aramco’s Riyadh refinery was burning on October 3, and Brent crude went above a hundred dollars a barrel. Then the Houthis turned on the airports. Last Thursday their missiles hit the presidential palace complex in Aden, the seat of the government Riyadh keeps alive, and killed two guards.
Washington supplies intelligence, targeting data and military advisers. Pakistan has sent equipment and advisers, according to Reuters, and in September it carried a Saudi warning to Tehran to rein in the Houthis. Turkish drones fly over Yemen, and France sent naval forces to protect Yanbu. Over the weekend Abdel Fattah al-Sisi asked Egypt’s parliament for an emergency session to approve military support for the kingdom. The Houthis have threatened every one of them, and none of these partners has offered the air war bin Salman asked for.
Trump has condemned the Houthis and accused them of trying to drive up oil prices before the American midterms, while still refusing the air campaign. In the spring of 2025 he bombed the Houthis for seven weeks over their attacks on shipping, then accepted an Omani-brokered deal in May under which the Houthis stopped hitting American ships—a deal that never covered anyone else. The Houthis today say international shipping can pass Bab al-Mandeb while Saudi vessels remain targets, leaving the strait open for Washington and closed for Riyadh.
On October 12 Haaretz reported that Benjamin Netanyahu had asked, through American mediators, for Saudi approval to join the war on the Houthis. A diplomatic source told the paper that bin Salman objected because of how the Saudi public would react. Even without published evidence of an ultimatum or any demand that the crown prince phone Netanyahu in public, the offer is a trap. Israeli jets over Yemen would let the Houthis say what they have said for a decade—that Riyadh fights at Israel’s side—at the moment Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians. Bin Salman has spent years silencing clerics, yet he cannot silence what his own people would make of that partnership, and he still needs the title of custodian of the holy mosques that Vision 2030 puts on every brochure.
Defenders of Riyadh usually fall back on three arguments, none of which mean much.
The first blames everything on Iran. Iran armed the Houthis and Tehran told them to escalate this year, by the account of its own sources. Yet Iran’s leverage in Yemen grew out of a Saudi war that drove a local rebel movement into Tehran’s arms, just as American diplomats warned in 2009 and Juneau warned in 2016. A state that ignores its own allies’ warnings for fifteen years doesn’t get to blame its rival for exploiting the result.
The second claims the West quietly keeps the Houthis alive as a counterweight to Riyadh, a theory that ignores how the United States and Britain bombed the Houthis in January 2024 and Trump bombed them again in 2025. Washington protects its own ships and oil markets, and it will not fight a ground war for control of Yemen’s coast on bin Salman’s behalf. A patron that wants allies to fight its wars has to give them a war worth fighting.
The third says Saudi Arabia is being punished for abandoning its Islamic identity, which gives theology too much credit and the palace too little blame. The Houthis didn’t take Mokha because women in Riyadh can drive; they took it because Saudi Arabia spent a decade paying rival Yemeni factions that hated each other, bombed one of them in January, and left the coast to three militias with no common commander.
Saudi Arabia was borrowing more even before this escalation. The IMF reported in June 2025 that central government debt had reached 26.2 percent of GDP in 2024 and that the deficit had widened to 2.5 percent, driven by project spending and flat oil revenue. Those numbers describe pressure rather than insolvency, as the kingdom still has deep reserves and cheap credit. The government’s pre-budget statement for 2026 projected a deficit of about 165 billion riyals, or 3.3 percent of GDP, covered by more borrowing at home and abroad. By October, the IMF was projecting a 3.3 percent contraction in the Saudi economy this year, with a rebound in 2027 only if the disruption eases. Reports this year say NEOM, the flagship desert megacity, has been scaled back amid the budget squeeze.
Vision 2030’s planners were right that an economy living on one commodity is hostage to its price, though the sectors bin Salman built to escape oil are the first ones a missile campaign hits. Airlines cancel flights when runways burn, and tourists don’t book resorts next to air raid sirens, even ones the government has switched off. Every strike on an airport hurts the new economy, and every strike on a refinery hurts the oil money meant to pay for it. The consultancies and contractors who designed Vision 2030 were paid long ago, leaving Saudi taxpayers and the migrant workers who poured the concrete with the risk.
The dead at the Riyadh airport included the pilgrims, cleaners, porters and drivers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and the Philippines who keep Saudi airports running and always fill the casualty lists in the Gulf. A Bangladeshi imam leading pilgrims to Mecca had no stake in Vision 2030 or in the Houthi imamate.
Yemenis pay the most, as they have for eleven years. The World Food Programme warned this month of a possible humanitarian catastrophe as the fighting spreads, and displacement rose sharply after the west coast offensive. Saudi Arabia accounts for an estimated 61 percent of Yemen’s formally recorded remittances, sent home by Yemeni labourers working inside the kingdom, which means Saudi airports and building sites also feed Yemeni families. The fighters on both sides are mostly poor young men: the Houthis recruit boys from the villages of Saada and Hajja, while the Saudi-funded brigades on the coast hire southerners and Tihama farmers for wages their families cannot earn any other way. Princes in Riyadh and the Houthi leadership in Sanaa have both stayed far from the front.
The Houthis should stop firing on airports and refineries now and release every UN and aid worker they hold. Saudi Arabia should honour the 2023 roadmap, pay the salaries it promised and stop bombing Yemeni cities. Washington, London and Paris should stop selling Riyadh the munitions for this war. The UN talks should restart this month with every Yemeni party at the table, including the southerners Riyadh tried to dissolve.