Saudi Aramco HQ hit in Houthi strike; Iran escalates ship attacks, threatens oil export recovery

Published Wed, Oct 14, 2026 · 06:45 AM

[DUBAI] Saudi Aramco’s headquarters in Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia was hit during a missile attack by Yemen’s Houthi militants on Tuesday (Oct 13) that caused a fire in a part of the complex, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The fire has since been put out, one of the people said. The extent of the damage was not clear, and it could not immediately be established what caused the fire or if the impact was from debris from intercepted projectiles.

The people familiar with the matter asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Aramco and the Saudi energy ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said Houthi missiles had targeted several cities in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, including the capital Riyadh and Dhahran where Aramco is headquartered. Shrapnel from an interception fell in part of a residential area in Dhahran, it said. 

The missiles launches are part of a wave of attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent days that has also targeted airports around the country, which left at least 18 people dead and hundreds injured.

The latest Houthi attacks come after the Saudi coalition had warned people in the vicinity of an oil site in Houthi-held capital Sanaa in Yemen to leave the area “for their safety”.

Other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia has also been targeted during the escalating hostilities with the Houthis. A refinery at Jazan in the kingdom’s west has been shut since an earlier attack, while a key oil export port on the Red Sea coast has also been targeted.

A cross-country pipeline that has been the main means for Aramco to get its oil to world markets was temporarily shut in September following an attack launched from Iraq.

Dhahran, located along Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast, is at the heart of the kingdom’s oil economy. It is home to Aramco, a university specialising in petroleum engineering and a major air base.

Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil fields are located in the deserts of the Eastern Province and in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian ship attacks threaten recovery of Gulf oil exports

Iranian attacks on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz have surged, potentially threatening the recent recovery in Persian Gulf oil exports.

People working in the shipping industry said there were signs that the flow of cargoes through the waterway may be slowing, after rising close to pre-war levels earlier in October.

Still, there was no clear evidence of change in oil loadings observed from several of the region’s top producer countries, and one shipowner said movements through Hormuz did not appear curtailed.

Increasing hostilities across the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia coming under a wave of attacks by Yemen’s Houthis, have helped push crude above US$106 a barrel in London on Monday, although prices eased a little on Tuesday. 

Four tankers were hit by unknown projectiles while transiting the chokepoint in separate incidents on Sunday, according to UK Maritime Trade Operations. That is roughly double the daily average number of attacks observed by the agency in the previous week.

There are growing signs of wariness among vessel operators, with tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showing more than a dozen supertankers and several Suezmax-class vessels either turning around or reversing course as they approached the key shipping hub of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, near the entrance to Hormuz.

Shipbrokers and some owners operating in the region described other signs of a slowdown in traffic, in particular longer waiting times for ship-to-ship transfers. One owner involved in these operations had not experienced a slowdown. 

Ship-to-ship transfers, in which shuttle tankers take on the risk of sailing through Hormuz then pump their cargoes onto other vessels for final delivery to buyers, have played a crucial part in boosting exports from the region.

Last week, before the latest escalation, Shell chief executive officer Wael Sawan estimated that oil flows from the Middle East had reached around 80 per cent of pre-conflict volumes.

Russell Hardy, chief of trading giant Vitol Group, said on Oct 6 that 12 million barrels a day of crude and another two million of fuels were exiting Hormuz.

Satellite images of export terminals inside the Persian Gulf, which offer a partial picture of what is happening because they can only be gathered intermittently, did not give clear signals of a slowdown. 

At Saudi Arabia’s Gulf oil terminals, loading activity has slowed from the surge seen in late September. Eight images from the EU’s Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 orbiters, covering seven days to Monday, show an average of four of the seven loading buoys in use, compared with five or six during the surge.

Five to six tankers were seen loading at Iraq’s southern oil terminal on each of the two days in October for which there were satellite images from Sentinel 2 available. That is consistent with loading rates observed in the second half of September.

Vessels passing through the waterway have been targeted for much of the Iran war, but with varying degrees of intensity. Previous waves of heavy strikes have led to brief reductions in shipments, though those declines have often been offset by higher volumes in subsequent days.

In July, a spate of attacks by Iran forced a brief lull in the shuttling trade through Hormuz, interrupting the crucial flow to global markets and helping trigger a rally in prices. The chief of Saudi Arabia’s shipping firm told an industry conference on Tuesday that the kingdom remains resolute.

“Right now people know that transportation and vessels and the entire supply chain matters and we’re going to deliver in defiance and in resilience,” Bahri CEO Ahmed Ali Alsubaey said at the WPC Energy Congress. 

The event in Riyadh went ahead despite deadly Houthi attacks on the city’s airports, though many executives from international oil firms cancelled their attendance. BLOOMBERG