Saudi-led forces bombed the international airport in Sanaa, Yemen, on Monday, reigniting the war with Yemen’s Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, which has been in a state of ceasefire that has held relatively well since 2022.
The attack was claimed by Yemen’s so-called “internationally recognized government,” which is based in Saudi Arabia and doesn’t have an air force of its own, meaning the strikes were almost certainly launched by Saudi warplanes.
In response, Ansar Allah’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, vowed Yemen would hit back and said the era of “de-escalation” between the two sides was over. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition later claimed that Saudi “air defenses intercepted a ballistic missile threat launched by the terrorist Houthi militia towards the southern region.”
Saree then announced that Yemeni forces targeted Saudi Arabia’s Abha International Airport with a “a number of ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.”
The purpose of the strikes on the Sanaa airport was to prevent the landing of a plane from Iran carrying a Yemeni delegation that attended the funeral of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Despite the strikes, the plane was rerouted and landed at the airport in the Yemeni Red Sea port city of Hodeidah.
The strikes came after the Saudi-led coalition threatened to take action in response to an Iranian flight that landed in Sanaa on July 3. At the time, Ansar Allah said that its forces “repelled” Saudi warplanes attempting to interfere with the flight, and two days later, Houthi fighters launched an offensive against Saudi-backed forces, the heaviest fighting between the two sides in years.
While the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 2022, a long-standing blockade on Yemen that included restrictions on Sanaa airport was only partially lifted, and in recent months, calls have been growing in Yemen for a complete end to the siege.
The escalation in Yemen comes after the ceasefire between the US and Iran has collapsed, meaning Yemen could be another front in the regional war. Ansar Allah could also potentially close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, a move that would further exacerbate the global economic crisis caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran.
The US and Ansar Allah agreed to a ceasefire last year after President Trump conducted a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen for about a month and a half, which failed to stop Yemeni attacks on Israel and the blockade of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea that was being done in response to Israel’s genocidal war and siege on Gaza.
Ansar Allah is known for its resilience as it faced a US-backed Saudi/UAE war and blockade from 2015 to 2022, which killed at least 377,000 people, according to UN numbers, and only became a more formidable fighting force in that time as it began successfully striking oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The group first took power in Sanaa in 2014, and the Saudis failed to reinstall former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who died in Riyadh earlier this year.
