I’m going to do a quick and dirty update on the latest news, most of which comes from the Yemen-Saudi front, and then will follow with quotes from some longer analysis pieces.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi calls an emergency session of the Egyptian parliament to consider defending Muhammad bin Salman’s Saudi regime while the UAE agrees to resume funding its mercenaries in Yemen. Ansar Allah claims to have downed a Saudi Apache helicopter off Najran and a reconnaissance drone over Hajjah.
Riyadh’s alarms were triggered, and explosions were heard in the Saudi capital. US embassy confirmed the arrest of US citizens for violating Saudi regulations against photographing damaged sites. The Saudis also claimed to have intercepted an Ansar Allah missile aimed at Yanbu.
The NYT reports on the flagship events, including the Urban Cycling World Championships, the Misk Foundation global forum (cancelled), the Saudi International golf tournament, the Six Kings Slam tennis exhibition, and the EU-GCC summit (postponed), the WPC Energy Congress, and the Future Investment Initiative (disrupted).
The Gray Lady is too hifalutin’ to mention the high-dollar combat sports events that are at risk, including a boxing match featuring Mexican star Canelo Alvarez on Halloween and a WWE pro-wrestling event and Ultimate Fighting Championship card in November.
Meanwhile, Saudi airstrikes continue to blast Yemen, killing more women and children as Ansar Allah forces push into western Taiz and blast Saudi-aligned forces in Badr, near Aden.
💢NEW: Ansarallah pushes into western Taiz city on multiple fronts and consolidates control over Jabal Han.
Ansar forces have advanced into multiple neighborhoods in western Taiz cit, southwestern Yemen, while clashing with the 35th Armored Brigade of the Taiz Military Axis. They are currently pressing down both main roads towards the junction in the strategic transportation hub of Bir Basha. With the current territorial gains, Ansarallah has also established effective control over all of Jabal Han, which overlooks the city from the west.
🔸By contributor @bonzerbarry
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) October 17, 2026
Iran announced support for a “political process” to resolve the Saudi-Ansar Allah conflict at the 52nd Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Council of Foreign Ministers in Baghdad. In the same speech, Araghchi said Iran has conveyed “a concrete seven-day plan” through Qatar under which “the Strait can be reopened and normal maritime passage restored within seven days. The choice now rests with the United States.”
On Thursday, Trump told Newsmax, “Now, we’re looking at Pickaxe Mountain. We may have to go there. We’ll take a shot at that one. We’ll knock it out fast.” On Friday night, IRIB correspondent Morteza Ghoroghi reported that the US had asked Iran for permission to strike the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site without retaliation and that Iran refused, per The Hormuz Letter, which also quoted Ghoroghi saying “Trump’s statements today point to war within the next 24 hours.” No US or Iranian official statement on the report has surfaced, and the 24 hours have passed without strikes.
The IRGC Navy says two supertankers, each carrying over 2 million barrels of crude, hit mines in the Strait of Hormuz and declared, “The Strait of Hormuz is closed.” A CENTCOM spokesman told Fox News the strait “is open.”
Another tanker was hit off the Saudi coast by an “unknown projectile.”
Will Schyver adds some tactical analysis:
💥 Note that the Yemeni fighter in a suit jacket assumes a well-conceived position, with maximum cover, and fires a belt-fed machine gun into the fortification to suppress their fire. Then it cuts to him firing the RPG overhead to administer the coup de grâce.
This is real war.
— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) October 17, 2026
مقاتل يمني يكسر كل قواعد التدريب العسكري وأعرافه بطريقة استخدامه لسلاح الـRPG! https://t.co/XZdLuaKjbd
— ابو يمن 🇾🇪 (@Dis545a) October 14, 2026
Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni-American scholar at Michigan State University is worth listening to. Here she is talking to Ryan Grim of Drop Site and Dr. Annelle Sheline of the Quincy Institute.
Here she is giving Aidan Simardone background on Ansar Allah:
Now let’s check some more mainstream analysis. Here’s how the Associated Press describes the Yemeni rebels’ growing strength:
At various times over the last decade, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Britain and Israel have carried out punishing air raids on the rebels — only to see them grow even stronger.
The Saudis have struggled to counter the latest attacks, even with far superior U.S.-supplied arms. A senior Saudi diplomat told reporters this week that Iran was encouraging the escalation and that over the summer the Houthis had spurned an offer to negotiate.
The Houthis operate in a large and mountainous territory where they can disperse fighters and military infrastructure while threatening major oil facilities and key trade routes.
…
The Houthis already have a wide array of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones — many resembling Iranian models — that can reach all the Gulf states as well as Israel. They have also used sophisticated anti-ship missiles and naval drones to strike vessels in the Red Sea, threatening a critical trade route.…a report by U.N. experts in 2024 documented extensive military ties between the Houthis, Iran and its other allies.
That report estimated that the Houthis had recruited up to 350,000 fighters by 2024, up from just 30,000 in 2015, when Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s civil war against the Houthis and imposed a naval blockade.
Qatar’s Al Jazeera has its own perspective, which hinges on the specious claim that “Yemen’s government” (ie the Saudi-aligned forces) are sustaining their “Dawn of Yemen” offensive against Ansar Allah — although I should note they are obeying Betteridge’s Law of Headlines — when they enquire, Can Yemen’s government forces sustain their offensive against the Houthis?
Frequent Houthi missile attacks – combined with the Iranian-backed group’s territorial gains around the city of Taiz in southwestern Yemen – have severed key supply routes and threatened other roads, ports, and airports that government forces rely on for supplies.
The disruptions could undermine the government’s Dawn of Yemen operation, which aims to recapture territory held by the Houthi group. This includes the capital, Sanaa, which the Houthis seized at the start of the war in 2014.
Government officials, however, say supply issues will not halt the offensive, emphasising that their forces can overcome logistical challenges.
“The Houthi group consistently attempts to sever supply lines to government forces, but they have been unable to halt these supplies. So, military operations against the Houthis will continue,” Colonel Wadah al-Dubaish, spokesperson for the government-aligned Joint Forces on Yemen’s West Coast, told Al Jazeera.
But losses to the Houthis over the past few months have been damaging to the government.
The New York Times’ summary of why the war started and re-started is also very interesting:
The war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government forces began in 2014, when the militia seized Sanaa. A truce was reached in 2022 but came under pressure this summer, when the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing the airport in Sanaa. The cease-fire collapsed entirely last month, when Houthi fighters took control of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline and declared a blockade on Saudi shipping.
“When the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia”…vintage narrative control right there and that kind of thing leads to the following, which reminds me to the UN condemnation of Iran for responding to being attacked by Israel and the U.S. earlier this year:
The United Nations Security Council on Friday condemned the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, and called for full enforcement of a 2015 resolution demanding that the group relinquish captured territory and weapons. Saudi officials welcomed the Council’s statement and reaffirmed what they called the kingdom’s right to defend itself under international law.
Larry Johnson has a bit more insight, after explaining that circa 2017 Ansar Allah missiles were notorious for rarely hitting what they aimed at, and detailing how they have become deadly accurate in the current round of fighting, he speculates on the possible sources for that improvement which has them scoring “hits on specific facilities at ranges of 1,000 kilometers or more, against one of the densest air-defense networks in the region”:
I spent a career around targeting and military planning, and I know what that pattern means. Accuracy at long range doesn’t come from a better rocket motor. A Scud-derived missile flying on inertial guidance alone accumulates error throughout its flight, and its reentry vehicle adds more. Getting from a miss of several hundred meters to tens of meters requires correcting the trajectory late in flight, through satellite-navigation updates, a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or a terminal seeker. Whatever the hardware, it also requires precise target coordinates. Neither of those is something Ansar Allah can manufacture in the mountains of Saada.
The missile bodies are Iranian lineage. That is not seriously disputed. But Iran’s own precision gains point to their source, and here there are two candidates, not one.
The first is Russia. Since Iran’s 2020 strike on Ain al-Asad, there have been persistent reports that Fateh-family missiles use GLONASS, Russia’s satellite navigation system. For Iran to use the encrypted, jam-resistant military GLONASS signal, Russia would have to hand over the cryptographic keys.
The second is China, and I would not discount it. China’s BeiDou constellation is larger than GPS, and its restricted, authorized-user service is built to resist jamming and spoofing. Researchers who follow the China-Iran relationship point to a reported 2015 agreement to integrate BeiDou into Iran’s military infrastructure, and to reports that Beijing opened its encrypted military signal to Tehran after the 2021 strategic partnership. By some accounts Iran completed its move off American GPS and onto BeiDou in June 2025, right after the 12-day war. Former French intelligence chief Alain Juillet has argued that the improvement in Iranian missile accuracy since then is best explained by BeiDou access. Tehran has never confirmed any of this. It says only that it uses every available source and depends on none.
Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper are anti-war Libertarians and Cooper is a veteran and expert military analyst:
I’ll close with Trita Parsi who’s on the outside edge of the MSM Overton Window:
Stay safe, y’all.