Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they struck a Saudi oil facility in the port city of Jiddah on November 23 with a new cruise missile, just hours after the kingdom finished hosting its virtual Group of 20 leaders summit.
The kingdom did not immediately acknowledge any attack as videos on social media suggested a fire struck a Saudi Arabian Oil Co. facility in Jiddah before dawn.
Brig. Gen. Yehia Sarie, a Houthi military spokesman, tweeted that the rebels fired a new Quds-2 cruise missile at the facility. He posted a satellite image online that matched Aramco’s North Jiddah Bulk Plant, where oil products are stored in tanks.
That facility is just southeast of Jiddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport, a major airfield that handles incoming Muslim pilgrims en route to nearby Mecca.
Online videos appeared to show a tank farm similar to the bulk plant on fire, with wailing sirens heard and police cars alongside a highway by the facility. Details of the videos posted pre-dawn Monday matched the general layout of the bulk plant. However, passers-by could not see damage to the tank farm from the highway running beside the facility later Monday morning.
Saudi state-run media did not immediately acknowledge the Houthi claim. Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil giant that now has a sliver of its worth traded publicly on the stock market, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its stock traded down slightly early Monday on Riyadh’s Tadawul stock exchange as crude oil prices remained steady above $40 a barrel.
The claimed attack comes just after a visit by outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the kingdom to see Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The kingdom also just hosted the annual G20 summit, which concluded on November 22.
A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Iranian-backed Houthis since March 2015, months after the rebels seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. The war has ground into a stalemate since, with Saudi Arabia facing international criticism for its airstrikes killing civilians.
The Houthis have used Quds, or “Jerusalem,” missiles to target Saudi Arabia in the past. The Quds-1 has a copy of a small, Czech-made TJ-100 jet engine, with a range of 700 kilometers (435 miles). United Nations experts have said they don’t believe the missiles are built in Yemen and instead have been sold or traded to them in violation of an arms embargo.
Iran uses a copy of TJ-100 engines in its drones program. U.N. experts, Arab countries and the West say Iran supplies arms to the rebels, allegations denied by Tehran.
The Quds-1 was used in a missile-and-drone strike on the heart of the kingdom’s oil industry in 2019 that shook global energy markets. The U.S. believes Iran carried out that attack amid a series of escalating incidents last year between Tehran and Washington, something Tehran denies.
