"Taking the Houthis at Their Word:
The Bill Saudi Arabia Doesn’t Want to Read"
by Larry C. Johnson
"Riyadh has a simple method for dealing with Houthi claims. It announces that its air defenses intercepted something, says nothing about everything else, and hopes the world changes the subject. Aramco, a company that publishes its quarterly earnings to the decimal point, suddenly develops a vow of silence whenever someone asks whether its refineries are on fire.
So let me try something different. For the length of this column, I am going to ignore the Saudi government and Aramco entirely and take Ansar Allah’s military spokesman, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, at his word. Not because Saree is a paragon of precision. Military spokesmen everywhere, including in Washington, inflate their results. I do it because the exercise tells you what the Houthis believe they are doing, what they are aiming at, and what Saudi Arabia stands to lose if even half of it is true. Since October 10, the answer is: quite a lot.
The target list: Between October 10 and October 29, Saree issued at least eight statements claiming strikes inside the kingdom. Read them together and a pattern jumps out. This is not random harassment. It is a campaign against three things: the capital, the oil export chain and the air bases that run the war in Yemen.
Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport appears in seven of those statements, on October 10, 11, 12, 19, 24, 26 and 29. Saree has declared it a “military target” and told airlines and travelers to stay away. The Houthis have also claimed King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, Abha airport three times and Najran airport three times.
On the energy side, the Houthis claim to have hit Aramco’s Yanbu complex three times, the East-West pipeline and its pumping stations twice, the Ras Tanura refinery twice, the Rabigh refinery twice, and the Abqaiq processing plant, the Shaybah oil field and Aramco’s headquarters in Dhahran once each. Ghawar, the largest oil field on earth, was reportedly on the October 10 list as well.
And on the military side, they claim the King Khalid Air Base at Khamis Mushait four times, a military headquarters in Najran, transport aircraft at Najran airport, a “Saudi navy task force camp,” radar sites at Jabal al-Hisn, Jabal al-Rahmah and Bir Askar, and, twice, the Saudi Ministry of Defense in Riyadh. Read that last one again. The Houthis claim they have twice hit the building from which the Saudi war in Yemen is run.
Every link in the chain: Here is the part that should keep Saudi oil ministers up at night. Look at the energy targets on a map, and you realize the Houthis are not just hitting oil facilities. They are claiming to hit every single link in the one supply chain Saudi Arabia has left.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed to normal traffic, the kingdom’s exports depend on a single route. Crude comes out of Ghawar and Shaybah in the east. It is processed at Abqaiq, which has a capacity of 7 million barrels a day and is the heart of the entire Saudi oil system. It is then pushed 1,200 kilometers west across the desert through the East-West pipeline, which has been running at its full 7 million barrels a day since March, by a string of pumping stations. And it is loaded onto tankers at Yanbu on the Red Sea, which was shipping about 5 million barrels a day of crude.
The Houthis claim to have hit the fields at the beginning, Abqaiq at the processing stage, the pumping stations in the middle and Yanbu at the exit. That is not a target list. That is a flowchart. My friend Karl Miller, who watches this closely from the region, told me weeks ago that four of the 11 pumping stations on that pipeline had been severely damaged and were not functioning. The Houthis’ latest claims suggest they intend to finish the job.
Running the numbers: So what is this worth? Brent was trading near $115 a barrel on October 28, the day after the Houthis claimed Ras Tanura. Let’s do some arithmetic.
If the claimed strikes on the pipeline, the pumping stations and Yanbu have cut the Red Sea exports in half, Saudi Arabia is losing roughly 2.5 million barrels a day. At $115, that is about $290 million a day, or around $8.6 billion a month. If Yanbu were shut entirely, the loss would be about $575 million a day, more than $17 billion a month. Those are not rounding errors, even for a country that has been known to buy a football club on a whim.
Then add the refineries. Ras Tanura has a capacity of about 550,000 barrels a day. Rabigh has roughly 400,000. Yanbu is home to three more. Take the claims at face value and the Houthis have struck plants representing well over a million barrels a day of refining. That is not merely lost revenue for Aramco. It is diesel, jet fuel and gasoline that the world, already short of all three, can’t buy from Saudi Arabia, and that Saudi Arabia may have to import for itself. A petrostate buying refined products from abroad is the energy equivalent of a bakery buying bread at the supermarket.
And then there is Abqaiq. We have seen this movie before. In September 2019, a drone and missile strike on Abqaiq and Khurais knocked out 5.7 million barrels a day, half of Saudi production, overnight. If the Houthis’ October 29 claim against Abqaiq is even partly true, they don’t need to hit anything else. Abqaiq is the chokepoint inside the chokepoint.
The real damage is political: The oil losses are serious, but they are temporary. Pipes get welded. Refineries restart. The political damage to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is far harder to repair.
MBS has staked everything on Vision 2030, the promise that Saudi Arabia will become a global hub for business, tourism, sport and investment. Every one of those businesses depends on one thing: the perception that the kingdom is safe. The Houthis are attacking that perception directly, which is why the capital’s airport is the most frequent name on their list. You can’t sell Riyadh as the Dubai of tomorrow when the Houthis are telling the world’s airlines not to land there. King Khalid Airport was closed from October 11 to October 18. The day after it reopened, Saudi Arabia postponed the Future Investment Initiative, the “Davos in the Desert” that BlackRock’s Larry Fink and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon were supposed to attend, until 2027. Nothing says “open for business” like canceling your flagship business conference.
Then consider the military claims. Saudi Arabia signed a $142 billion arms package with Washington in May 2025, the largest in history, on top of decades of Patriots, F-15s and everything else money can buy. If Saree is to be believed, the Houthis, a movement that controls the poorest country in the Arab world, have repeatedly struck the main air base in the south, the radar network that is supposed to see them coming and the Defense Ministry in the capital. That is a humiliation that no amount of PR can hide. It raises an awkward question in every Gulf capital: what exactly did all that money buy?
It also explains the diplomatic scramble I wrote about last week. Riyadh’s new allies in Pakistan and Turkey have made it clear they will not cross into Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s defense minister flew to Tehran. There are reports, unconfirmed by Riyadh, of a $1 billion down payment to buy calm. Countries that are winning wars do not send their defense ministers to the other side’s patron with a checkbook.
The fine print: In fairness, I said I would take Saree at his word, and his word has a curious feature. On October 31, after the Saudi-led coalition said it had shot down a Houthi drone over Medina, Saree indignantly denied it. The Houthis, he said, had “not carried out any operation directed towards the Saudi interior.” So Ansar Allah will happily claim the Defense Ministry, Abqaiq and the Riyadh airport, but it draws the line at the holy cities. That isn’t modesty. It’s message discipline. The Houthis want the Muslim world to see a war against the House of Saud, not against Islam’s holiest sites.
Which brings me to the bottom line. Even if Saree is exaggerating by half, and he may be, Saudi Arabia is now fighting a war it cannot win on the ground, cannot stop from the air and cannot afford to keep losing at the pump. The Houthis don’t have to destroy Aramco. They only have to convince the world’s airlines, insurers and investors that the kingdom is a war zone. On present evidence, they are doing a pretty good job of it.
Somewhere in Riyadh, an Aramco spokesman is drafting another statement that says nothing. In Sanaa, Yahya Saree is drafting another target list. I know which one I’d read first."
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