An attack on Riyadh's international airport on 10 October killed at least 12 people and wounded about 300, according to Saudi authorities, in what has been described as the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a decade. Saudi Arabia blamed Yemen's Houthi movement. The dead included four Saudis, two Bangladeshis and one person each from the United States, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Egypt, the General Authority of Civil Aviation said.
It was the third attack on the same airport in a week, and it came as Saudi Arabia pressed an air campaign against the Houthis inside Yemen. To understand how two neighbours reached this point, it helps to go back about thirty years.
The Houthis, who call themselves Ansar Allah, grew out of a religious revival movement among Zaydi Shia Muslims in Saada, in Yemen's northern highlands, in the early 1990s. The Zaydis are a distinct branch of Shia Islam, and their imams ruled much of northern Yemen for roughly a thousand years until the 1960s. The movement takes its name from Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a former member of parliament who led it.
Hussein al-Houthi was killed by government forces in Saada in 2004, which set off an insurgency. Six rounds of fighting between the Houthis and the Yemeni government followed between 2004 and 2010, ending without a clear result. Leadership passed to his brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, who still heads the movement. Saudi Arabia was drawn into border fighting with the group in 2009.
The uprisings of 2011 unseated Yemen's long-serving president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the political transition that followed never took hold. In September 2014 the Houthis captured the capital, Sanaa. By early 2015 they were advancing south, and President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled the country.
In March 2015 a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia began an air campaign aimed at restoring Hadi's government. What was expected to be a short operation became a war lasting years.
The human cost was severe. The United Nations Development Programme projected in November 2021 that the conflict would have caused 377,000 deaths by the end of that year. That figure is a model-based projection rather than a body count, and the UNDP estimated that close to 60 percent of those deaths came from indirect causes such as hunger and preventable disease rather than from fighting.
The war also reached Saudi territory. Over the years the Houthis fired missiles and drones at Saudi cities, airports and oil installations, and the kingdom's air defences intercepted many of them.
Fighting on a large scale largely stopped after the United Nations brokered a truce in 2022. Relations cooled further in March 2023, when Saudi Arabia and Iran, which Western governments and Riyadh say arms the Houthis, agreed to restore diplomatic ties in a deal brokered by China. Saudi officials held direct talks with the Houthis.
That calm broke this year. In July the Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi shipping, and fighting resumed after an Iranian aircraft attempted to land in Sanaa without Saudi authorisation, followed by strikes on Sanaa airport and Houthi retaliation. Shipping lay behind much of it: with Iranian restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia had come to rely far more on its Red Sea route, and the Houthis were pushing towards the western coast.
The fighting escalated through September. The Houthis launched an offensive against government forces on 3 September, and on 8 September struck the Saudi cities of Khamis Mushait, Abha, Jizan and Najran, wounding 73 people, according to the coalition spokesman. The World Health Organization said at least 728 people had been killed or wounded in Yemen since 23 August, mostly in Taiz and along the western coast.
Casualty claims from both sides are difficult to verify independently. Saudi Arabia said it carried out 1,879 strikes and killed about 950 fighters in a single day this month, while the Houthi-run health ministry said Saudi attacks had killed 107 people across 13 provinces since 3 September.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, condemned the airport attack, and the UN envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, called it a grave escalation. Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and others condemned it, while Oman urged restraint. US President Donald Trump said Washington was weighing whether to join the campaign against the Houthis, who have warned of a response if it does.