Saudi Arabia: air defence destroys three Houthi cruise missiles heading for Riyadh – the Houthis claim F-15s were turned back from Sanaa

Saudi air defence destroyed three cruise missiles fired by the Houthis towards the Riyadh area on Wednesday, November 11. The announcement was made by Brigadier General Turki al-Maliki, official spokesman of the coalition backing Yemen’s internationally recognised government, in a statement published by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) at 17:16 local time.

The kingdom’s capital was targeted for a second consecutive day. On Tuesday, November 10, the same spokesman had reported a ballistic missile and a cruise missile destroyed heading for Riyadh, another ballistic missile towards the Southern Region and a drone shot down over the Eastern Province. Residents of the capital then received an early-warning message from Civil Defence, followed by an update that the threat had passed.

The attacks came days after Sunday’s strike, when debris damaged the Aramco tower in Riyadh’s financial district, as we reported in our report on the Aramco tower.

The Houthis’ claims

On Tuesday the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, announced four “special” operations with ballistic missiles and drones inside Saudi Arabia. According to him, the targets were King Khalid International Airport and East-West pipeline pumping stations in Riyadh, the Aramco facility at Abqaiq, concentrations of government forces in the Al Mandareb and Ras al-Ara areas, and the financial centre of the Saudi capital. Saree presented the attacks as retaliation for Saudi strikes on the Al Khadra market in Taiz and a village in the Bani Hushaish area, where, he said, US GBU-12 and GBU-38 bombs were used.

In the same statement Saree rejected as a “blatant lie” the Saudi version that the East-West pipeline near Medina was the target (see our earlier report), arguing the strikes were in Riyadh. He also urged investors and companies to move their capital out of the kingdom, calling Saudi Arabia an “unsafe environment” until it ends its “aggression” and blockade of Yemen.

At midday on Wednesday the movement further claimed that its forces prevented a formation of Saudi F-15s from entering Sanaa’s airspace and forced it to leave. In a statement on Tuesday the Houthis said they had come under 109 air strikes and missile attacks in 24 hours on Sanaa and six governorates, by F-15 and Typhoon aircraft from the Khamis Mushait and Taif bases, bringing the total since the escalation to 4,672. These are the Houthis’ own claims, which we have not verified independently.

On the ground in Yemen, fighting continues on several fronts. Our report on the government army’s 874 strikes has the latest count, and the debris incident near Mecca is in our report from Thursday.