Houthis: Drone hits Saudi airport
22 May, 2019
Yemen’s Houthi rebels said Tuesday they launched a bomb-laden drone targeting an airport in Saudi Arabia that also has a military base inside of it, an attack acknowledged by the kingdom as Mideast tensions remain high between Iran and the United States.
The attack on Najran comes as Iran quadrupled its uranium-enrichment production capacity amid tensions with the United States over Tehran’s atomic program, nuclear officials said Monday, just after U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s foreign minister traded threats and taunts on Twitter.
In the drone attack, the Houthi’s Al-Masirah satellite news channel said early Tuesday they targeted the airport in Najran with a Qasef-2K drone, striking an “arms depot” there. Najran, 840 kilometers southwest of Riyadh, is right on the Saudi border with Yemen and has repeatedly been targeted by the Iranian-allied Houthis.
A statement earlier Tuesday on the state-run Saudi Press Agency quoted Saudi-led coalition spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki as saying the Houthis “had tried to target” a civilian site in Najran, without elaborating. It was not clear if there were any injuries.
Al-Maliki warned there would be a “strong deterrent” to such attacks and described the Houthis as the “terrorist militias of Iran.” Such Houthi attacks in the past have sparked rounds of Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen, which have been widely criticized internationally for killing civilians.
Civilian airports throughout the Middle East often host military bases.
The New York Times last year reported that American intelligence analysts were based in Najran assisting the Saudis and a U.S. Army Green Berets deployment on the border. The Pentagon and the U.S. military’s Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last week, the Houthis launched a coordinated drone attack on a Saudi oil pipeline amid heightened tensions between Iran and the United States.
That came as already this month, officials in the United Arab Emirates alleged that four oil tankers were sabotaged and U.S. diplomats relayed a warning that commercial airlines could be misidentified by Iran and attacked, something dismissed by Tehran.
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