Yesterday in Riyadh, a missile fired by Yemen’s Houthis struck King Khalid International Airport, killed 13 people, and wounded hundreds more. Attacks in the previous week had killed four others. Because Saudi Arabia has been trying for years to shed its reputation for austerity and discomfort, a sterile, boring airport with overpriced pastries and harsh lighting is a national accomplishment. The strike turned that airport into chaos, its floors streaked with blood and lounges billowing with smoke. The Houthi military spokesman announced that the attacks would continue on a reciprocal basis—“airport for airport, siege for siege, and escalation for escalation”—until the Houthis achieve their stated goals: the “death” of America, Israel, and their allies, and an apocalyptic victory for Islam. Escalation, in other words, is assured. The Houthis hit the Riyadh airport again today.
Saudi Arabia’s ongoing self-transformation during the past decade has involved trading cosmic goals—the spread of Sunni Islam over the world—for more modest local ones, such as opening specialty coffee shops in Jeddah and hosting pro-wrestling contests in Riyadh. (The two most prominent international events in the coming weeks in Saudi Arabia are an investment conference and World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Crown Jewel.”) One can imagine the frustration that Saudis feel, just as they try to exit the game of global religious domination, to be pulled back in by a neighbor far more zealous than they ever were. The Houthis “are on a divine mission,” Nadwa Al-Dawsari, an independent Yemeni researcher, told me last year. That mission, she said, is to “keep the war going, at least until Jerusalem.” Negotiation, for them, consists of tactical delay, so they can resume the fight and fight harder. “Why would they want a deal when they can get everything?”
Earlier this week the Houthis’ leader, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, delivered a typically long-winded denunciation of the Saudis. He devoted the bulk of it to condemning the Saudis for doing exactly what the Houthis have just done openly: targeting civilians. This decade-long conflict has indeed been characterized by a lengthy series of atrocities. Abd al-Malik listed alleged Saudi attacks against weddings, funerals, and homes—the total death toll far exceeding the missiles in Riyadh—and concluded that the Saudis were not Muslims at all but “Zionists” who follow “Satan.” He mentioned an attack on a market in Taiz, and said “there is absolutely no justification for targeting such a place,” because “it was a market, not a military camp.”
Riyadh’s airport is also a civilian target, but I suppose because the Houthis think they are fighting Satan, they are willing to excuse their own hypocrisy. (Here you can watch a group of travelers, dressed for pilgrimage to Mecca, blown off their feet.) What’s clear from the entire arc of the Houthis’ rise is that they are, as Al-Dawsari suggested, unwilling to negotiate, let alone go away or enter into what the Houthi leader describes as “an honourable peace with the Yemeni people,” “founded on good neighborly relations and mutual respect.” Sensible Saudi leaders would appease or join the Houthis, he said, but instead “they follow the Satanic approach.”
Iran must be happy. Recently, Donald Trump has taken to gloating about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which now flows with oil traffic at near prewar rates. But the entire Iranian “Axis of Resistance”—the coordinate group including the Houthis, Iraqi Shiite militias, Hamas, and Hezbollah—was meant, as one American official put it to me, to be a keyboard on which many notes could be played, with rhythms able to keep the United States and its allies off the beat. Israel’s initial attacks against Iran in 2025 were an attempt to shoot the piano player. Iran has not only survived but also bragged that it has a surfeit of targets to select from. It is not a coincidence that just as Trump was congratulating himself for opening the strait last week, U.S. bombers had to scramble off the tarmac because of reported threats of an Iranian attack at RAF Fairford in England.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a reputation for erratic decisions—sudden, apparently whim-driven plans to invest heavily in particular sectors, to pick fights with neighbors, or to oppress or kill this or that critic of his rule. This reputation is not entirely fair. He has been consistent, and indeed reasonable, in seeking, above all else, a path toward economic development uninterrupted by war or tumult. The main effect of this campaign by the Houthis is to disrupt that path. The Houthis are holding Saudi Arabia’s transition hostage by doing the only thing they have ever done successfully: fighting. It is not obvious that anyone has enough of a corresponding appetite for war to stop them.