Iran-backed Houthis said Monday (5 October)  they had struck Riyadh’s international airport, an oil refinery and other sites in Saudi Arabia, as the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said they had destroyed Houthi targets on the Red Sea coast.

Pakistan and Turkey have pledged to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia under a new mutual defence pact following weeks of Houthi attacks, as Riyadh and its Yemeni government allies began an ambitious push aimed at retaking all territory held by the group.

The fighting in Yemen has become the most active front in the Middle East war in recent weeks, displacing more than 184,000 people, the United Nations says, and deepening the conflict that has engulfed the wider region.

The Houthis previously controlled much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa and the western city of Hodeida, but seized swathes of coastline last month along the Red Sea and key Bab al-Mandab Strait, in Yemen’s deadliest fighting in years.

The Houthis have also been attacking neighbouring Saudi Arabia since Yemen’s civil war flared back to life and have declared a maritime blockade on its ships.

The Yemeni military said it carried out more than 1,000 strikes and began an offensive against Sanaa, while the Saudi-led coalition supporting the internationally recognised government said 100 warplanes flew sorties at dawn.

Turki Al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said on X that its naval forces had hit “military targets” belonging to the Houthis in Hodeida on the Red Sea coast.

They “destroyed weapons depots, facilities storing booby-trapped boats and naval mines” and had “thwarted a planned attack” targeting waterways in the southern Red Sea, he said.

Later, the military said it had driven the Houthis from the area surrounding the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — a vital route for maritime traffic — including the port city of Mocha, Dhubab airport and Al-Omari military camp.

They also said they expelled the Houthis from several areas in Taiz in the southwest, where deadly fighting has surged in recent days.

Military sources stopped short of confirming an official announcement of Mocha’s recapture, saying that pro-government forces had cut off the only supply route to the port.

UN ‘deeply concerned’

Loud explosions rattled the Saudi capital on Monday evening, with a Houthi spokesman saying the group had hit King Khalid International Airport, a refinery belonging to state oil giant Aramco and other targets in the kingdom’s south.

It came a day after Yemen’s government announced the lofty goal of retaking all Houthi territory — home to most of the country’s population, and much of it held for more than a decade.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey held an emergency meeting in Riyadh on Monday under the auspices of a joint defence agreement signed in August committing them to come to each other’s aid in the event of any attack.

They also agreed “to take the necessary measures to provide the agreed military forces and capabilities and ensure their rapid deployment in the Kingdom”.

The statement did not specify what role the troops would fill once in Saudi Arabia.

A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply concerned by the sharp escalation in fighting”, and condemned “the continued Houthi cross-border attacks” on Saudi Arabia.

Houthi attacks have repeatedly targeted Saudi oil infrastructure, as well as its tankers in the Red Sea.

A source in the Saudi energy sector told AFP that an attack Sunday had again halted pumping by the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, a key conduit for the kingdom’s exports since Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the wider Middle East war.

Crude prices had already been soaring as a result of the Middle East war before the Houthis began targeting the world’s largest oil exporter.

Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser warned on Monday that global oil stockpiles were “scarily thin” owing to the war.

“The system is already straining,” Nasser told the Energy Intelligence Forum in London.