Yemen’s Ansarullah warns airlines against using Saudi airports after Riyadh attack
Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement issued a new threat to Saudi Arabia’s airspace on Sunday after an attack on the kingdom’s international airport in Riyadh killed 12 people and wounded hundreds, forcing authorities to stop operations.
Saturday’s attack, the deadliest on Saudi soil in more than a decade, was a sharp escalation in the Yemen war, where Riyadh backs forces against the resistance movement, who captured swathes of Red Sea coastline in a lightning offensive last month.
While the Ansarullah movement stopped short of claiming the strike, they threatened new attacks on the kingdom’s airports, except for the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, warning passengers not to travel.
“The airports and airspace are exposed to targeting and constitute a theatre of operations for our forces,” military spokesman Yahya Saree wrote on X.
He stressed that Yemeni Armed Forces will continue implementation of the “airport for airport, siege for siege, and escalation for escalation” equation until the Saudi military aggression on Yemen ceases, and the tight blockade against the Arab Peninsula country is lifted completely.
The remarks came on the same day that Saudi fighter aircraft carried out a new spate of airstrikes against multiple locations across Yemen.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting the group in Yemen attributed Saturday’s attack to Ansarullah, calling it a “full-fledged war crime".
The assault on Riyadh’s airport drew condemnation from the United Nations and world leaders including US President Donald Trump, who said he was considering joining Saudi strikes against the Ansarullah movement.
“We may. We’re going to look at it. We just found out about the recent attack, so we’ll make a decision,” he told reporters.
Four Saudi citizens, two Bangladeshis, one American, one Egyptian, one Jordanian, one Syrian, one Palestinian and one Sudanese were killed, Saudi Arabia’s civil aviation authority said.
It said some of the 309 wounded were in serious condition.
Authorities suspended operations at the airport into Sunday, a senior aviation source said, with air traffic monitor Flightradar24 saying the closure was extended until 2100 GMT.
The US, Canadian, German and Spanish embassies in Saudi Arabia warned their citizens to avoid Riyadh airport.
The strike was the deadliest attack in the kingdom since a 2015 suicide bombing.
While seizing large swathes of territory along the Red Sea coast in Yemen, the Ansarullah has also attacked Saudi transport hubs, oil facilities and other civilian targets in the world’s largest crude exporter.
Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni forces it backs have struggled to contain Ansarullah’s advance, despite a counter-offensive aimed at recapturing territory including the area around the Bab al-Mandab strait that is crucial to global energy flows.
The Ansarullah had already controlled the capital Sana’a and most of Yemen’s major population centers since the start of the war in 2014.
Riyadh’s military coalition intervened to support the government the following year.