A Houthi missile strike on King Khalid international airport in Riyadh has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, according to Nesrine Malik, writing in a Guardian opinion column. The attack, launched on Saturday, was the deadliest single strike on any Gulf country since the United States and Israel opened their war on Iran in February.
Malik writes that a toll of this size is bewilderingly high for Saudi Arabia, a state unaccustomed to such losses, and that it is likely to draw a bloody response.
The columnist argues that the Gulf has spent the past year entering a new period of instability that is neither temporary nor reversible. She acknowledges that casualties across the region have been modest next to those in Gaza and Iran, but contends that the slow erosion of peace and security in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates has reshaped the region more profoundly than its leaders care to admit.
Two attacks that broke a norm
According to Malik, the first previously unthinkable development came just over a year ago, when Iran fired missiles at a Qatari airbase hosting American troops in retaliation for US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Shrapnel fell across Doha, a dismaying outcome for the Qataris, who had sought to keep good relations with Tehran. Even so, she writes, the Iranians gave a degree of warning and coordination that marked the attack as a face-saving gesture.
Later in 2025, she notes, Israel struck Doha without any comparable warning while targeting Hamas members, killing five Palestinians and one Qatari. In her account, that strike marked the beginning of the end of a longstanding expectation that Gulf lives and sovereignty were sacrosanct — an expectation upheld by managing relations with Iran and by alliances with Washington.
Gulf states drawn into the Iran war
Malik links the situation to the war on Iran waged by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, which she says pulled the Gulf fully into the conflict. Iran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman in retaliation for what it regards as political, military and logistical backing for the offensive against it. Tehran’s targets included military sites, energy facilities and desalination plants — infrastructure underpinning those economies. Further damage followed from the halt to normal life, months of school closures, and the shuttering of airports and airspace.
From the standpoint of Gulf rulers, the columnist identifies the most damaging consequence as the disruption of these states’ integration into the wider international community as destinations for tourism, entrepreneurs, sport and entertainment. They spent billions securing Formula One, golf and boxing franchises and tournaments, she writes, only for a wave of inexpensive drones to put those investments at risk.
Yemen’s war reactivated
Malik traces the fractious unravelling to Yemen, where civil war began in 2014 when Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital, Sana’a, seeking greater autonomy in the minority Shia homelands. In 2015 a Saudi-led coalition mounted a campaign to dislodge them, deepening a war that killed hundreds of thousands and produced a humanitarian catastrophe. The fighting de-escalated in 2022 through a de facto but never formalised division of the country between the Houthis and an internationally recognised, Saudi-backed government, a ceasefire that was followed by a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement.
The 2026 war against Iran, she argues, created fresh strategic openings and revived political loyalties, prompting a surge in Houthi advances in Yemen. The closure of the strait of Hormuz diverted more commercial traffic along Yemen’s coast, pushing the Houthis to seize territory so as to control the now pivotal Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea. Tensions peaked five months into the war, when Saudi Arabia escalated its strikes against the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government bombed its own airport in Sana’a to stop an Iranian plane from landing.
Malik rejects the idea that these events are simply the work of a mischievous group exploiting a contest between Iran and the west. While Iran backs the Houthis, she writes, they are not empty proxies: they hold domestic ambitions and sharp regional grievances, especially towards the House of Saud, whom they regard as an imperious and arrogant master they will never submit to. She cites a senior Houthi official’s statement that Saturday’s attack was carried out “so that the world understands” that Yemeni civilian infrastructure has been and continues to be targeted by the Saudis.
US security umbrella questioned
Viewed from another angle, the columnist places the events in the region among the consequences of Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel and the subsequent fighting in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. She argues the last element holding the region’s tense equilibriums in place collapsed when Trump decided the safety of America’s Gulf allies was secondary to what he called his Iran “excursion”. The limits of relying on the US security umbrella, she adds, became evident to allies and adversaries alike.
Last month, according to Malik, the Trump administration declined to extend military assistance to Saudi Arabia for its fight against the Houthis, following a meeting between US officials and the Houthis in which the group assured them it would not attack US ships in the Red Sea — only Saudi vessels.
What now confronts Saudi Arabia, she concludes, is a long and intractable war against a resourceful and impassioned adversary willing to absorb a high degree of pain — something Riyadh cannot match without orienting itself entirely towards war. Judging by the 2015 campaign, she warns, it will claim thousands of lives with only a remote chance of a decisive outcome.
Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, Malik writes, are being pulled deeper into the storm: Trump cannot bring the Iran war to an end, Gaza remains an open wound, and Israel continues to strike and occupy parts of Lebanon. The Houthi resurgence, in her assessment, reflects a new reality in a region that is bewildered and losing both lives and capital, caught between alliances that no longer function and hostilities too calamitous to confront.
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