Houthis claim Riyadh missile attack as Saudi pipeline strike goes unclaimed

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Houthi rebels say at least 44 killed in airstrike near Yemeni capital, and other Mideast news independent.co.uk

Debris from intercepted missiles smashed several floors of a Saudi Aramco office tower in Riyadh's financial district on Sunday, an attack the Houthis claimed. A day later, an attack on the East-West pipeline in the Medina region caused a fire that Saudi Arabia's Energy Ministry described as limited and quickly extinguished, with operations unaffected and no casualties. The ministry did not identify an attacker, and the Houthis said nothing about it.

The pipeline is the artery that carries Saudi crude across the kingdom to Red Sea terminals, the export route that does not depend on the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint at the centre of the war between Iran and the United States. With the sea lane contested, the overland line is the kingdom's fallback — and this week it was on fire too. On Monday, as the Energy Ministry reported the blaze, the Saudi-led coalition announced it had destroyed three Houthi facilities: a factory assembling ballistic missile components, a chemical plant producing solid rocket fuel, and an electronics workshop building missile systems. It did not specify their locations.

The heaviest toll came on Saturday, when airstrikes on homes in the village of al-Shariya, east of Sanaa, killed at least 44 people — 21 of them children, 10 of them women — and wounded 40 more, according to the Houthi-run Health Ministry, whose spokesperson blamed Saudi Arabia and said rescue teams were still searching the rubble for the missing. Iran's foreign ministry, for its part, dismissed remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called some Iranian demands for ending the war "outrageous and ridiculous."

In Damascus, Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani told a press conference that Syria has not deployed forces to Yemen to fight the Houthis and has no immediate plan to do so — a day after the Associated Press reported that Syria was preparing an initial group of 600 special forces for Saudi Arabia, to be stationed on the border with Yemen. "Any military operation outside our borders would certainly be announced and discussed publicly," al-Shibani said. "It would not be carried out in secret."