Yemen’s Houthi rebels have unleashed a barrage of drone and missile strikes on Saudi Arabia that targeted key facilities including natural gas and desalination plants, the latest escalation as peace talks stall and the war in Yemen rages into its eighth year.
No-one was injured in the attacks on Sunday, the Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen said, but civilian vehicles and homes in the area were damaged.
Yehia Sarie, a spokesman for Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, said the group had launched “a wide and large military operation into the depth of Saudi Arabia”, firing ballistic missiles and bomb-laden drones towards Saudi Aramco – Saudi Arabia’s state-backed oil giant – facilities and other “sensitive targets” in the country.
He described the assault as retaliation for the Saudi-led “aggression and blockade” that has turned much of Yemen into a wasteland.
The military coalition said it thwarted an attack on a liquified gas plant at a petrochemicals complex in the Red Sea port of Yanbu run by Aramco.
An official at Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy says the attack caused a “temporary reduction in the refinery’s production, which will be compensated for from the inventory”.
Other aerial strikes targeted a power station in the country’s south-west, a desalination facility in Al-Shaqeeq on the Red Sea coast, an Aramco terminal in the southern border town of Jizan, and a fuel station in the southern city of Khamis Mushait, the coalition said.
The official Saudi Press Agency posted various photos of fire vehicles dousing flames with water, as well as wrecked cars and craters in the ground allegedly left by the series of drone and ballistic missile strikes.
The barrage comes after the Saudi-based Gulf Co-operation Council invited Yemen’s warring sides for talks in Riyadh aimed at ending the war – an offer dismissed out of hand by the Houthis, who demanded that negotiations take place in a “neutral” country.
Peace talks have floundered since the Houthis have tried to capture oil-rich Marib, one of the last remaining strongholds of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government in the country’s north.
Yemen’s brutal war erupted in 2015, after the Iran-backed Shiite Houthis seized the country’s capital, Sanaa, and much of the north.
Saudi Arabia, fearing an Iranian presence on its border, and other Arab states launched a devastating air campaign to oust the Houthis and restore the internationally-recognised government.
The conflict has settled into a bloody stalemate, with Saudi Arabia and its allies struggling to turn the tide. Saudi-led coalition air strikes have decimated infrastructure and struck civilian targets in Yemen like hospitals and wedding parties, drawing widespread international criticism.
The ongoing war has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, with a recent UN report estimating that hundreds of thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced as a result of the conflict.
