Houthi strikes on Abha and Riyadh airports kill three foreign nationals

Three civilians were killed and 36 wounded in attacks on two Saudi airports on Tuesday and Wednesday, the kingdom's General Authority of Civil Aviation said. One person died and eight were wounded at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Two people died and 28 were wounded at Abha, near the Yemen border. The authority did not say which strike fell on which day.

Al Jazeera, citing the same authority, named the dead as foreign nationals. At Abha the two killed were women, one Moroccan and one Algerian, with 28 others hurt. At King Khalid the person killed was a Sudanese citizen. Of the eight wounded there, five were Saudi. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group had aimed several drones at King Khalid. He did not, in the statement Reuters carried, claim Abha in the same words. The Saudi-led coalition said the attacks would not go unpunished.

The retaliation the coalition announced

Late on Wednesday the coalition said it had struck more than 80 Houthi military sites in Saada, Hodeidah, Jawf and Marib. It did not publish a damage assessment or a count of casualties on the Yemeni side. The geography of the list matters. Saada is the Houthi heartland in the north. Hodeidah is the Red Sea port. Jawf and Marib are inland provinces where the front has moved for years. A strike list that long, issued within hours of airport deaths, is a decision to answer on the ground rather than only with an interception claim.

This is not the first hit on King Khalid this season. On 18 September the coalition said it had intercepted a ballistic missile fired toward the airport. A day later at least one explosion was heard near the field, and smoke rose from a fuel storage area. Tuesday and Wednesday's deaths are the first the civil aviation authority has tied to this round of airport attacks with a named toll of three.

What the airports are for

King Khalid is the capital's main civil field. Abha serves the south-western Asir region and sits close to the Yemen border, which is why it has been hit in earlier rounds of the war. Closing either field, even for hours, moves hajj and business traffic and forces diversions. The authority did not say how long either airport was disrupted this week. Reuters reported that the Riyadh attack interrupted air traffic. A passenger toll of three dead and 36 wounded, most of them at Abha, is a civil casualty list, not a military one. The authority described the dead as residents and foreign nationals, not as soldiers.

The wider fight is the Yemen war's newest turn toward the Bab al-Mandeb. Saudi-backed forces of the recognised government are in combat with the Houthis, who hold a long stretch of coast beside the strait that joins the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Any Houthi hold on that waterway is a problem for oil and container traffic that does not pass through Saudi airports at all. The airport strikes are the part of the war that lands on civilians in the kingdom. The strait is the part that lands on shipping.

What is still unconfirmed

The coalition has not said which weapon hit Abha and which hit Riyadh, beyond Saree's drone claim for the capital. It has not said whether the dead were in a terminal, on a road, or at a fuel point. Those details decide whether the next defensive step is a shelter plan for passengers or a change in flight paths. Until the authority publishes them, the firm numbers are the ones it has already given: three dead, 36 wounded, two airports, and more than 80 sites struck in reply.