Rashad al-Alimi, the head of the Riyadh-based Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council, announced on Sunday that Saudi-backed forces were launching a major offensive aimed at capturing all areas of Yemen under the control of Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis.
Al-Alimi has been based largely in Saudi Arabia for more than a decade, having left Yemen after Ansar Allah’s takeover of Sanaa in 2014. While he is framing the offensive as a Yemeni operation, it will rely heavily on Saudi Arabia, which arms and funds many of the ground forces involved and has been conducting heavy airstrikes against Ansar Allah-controlled Yemen, where most of the country’s population lives.
The US is also deeply involved in the war as it is providing targeting and intelligence support for the Saudi air campaign, though so far, it has refrained from launching direct strikes. A US-Ansar Allah ceasefire reached in May 2025 remains in effect, and Ansar Allah has warned that it would escalate in response to any direct US attacks.
A US official told Axios on Sunday that the US “is not going to take kinetic action for now,” though the official said that could change if the operations against Ansar Allah run into problems. The Saudi-backed ground forces are unlikely to succeed, as Ansar Allah’s military has made sweeping gains since it launched a ground offensive in early September, and previous wars and bombing campaigns against Ansar Allah have failed.
Saudi Arabia appears to have significantly escalated its strikes in Yemen in recent days, as Saudi forces and Ansar Allah have traded attacks against each other’s capitals. Ansar Allah military spokesman Yahya Saree said Sunday that Yemeni forces recorded more than 100 Saudi airstrikes and missile attacks over the past 24 hours.
“Over the past 24 hours, Saudi warplanes launched 106 airstrikes and missile attacks targeting civilian areas in the capital, Sanaa, and the governorates of Al-Jawf, Taiz, Amran, Hajjah, and Sa’dah,” Saree wrote on Telegram.
“These attacks were carried out using F-15 and Typhoon aircraft that took off from Khamis Mushait and Taif airbases, with missile strikes originating from Najran. This brings the total number of Saudi-led airstrikes and missile attacks since the escalation against our country to 1,516,” Saree added.
The US-backed Saudi-led coalition that waged a war in Yemen from 2015 to 2022 was notorious for bombing civilian areas, and there has been an increasing number of civilian casualties since the war was reignited by Saudi airstrikes targeting the Sanaa International Airport in July.
The Yemeni Health Ministry within the Ansar Allah-led government said that a Saudi airstrike on Sunday hit a sponge factory in Sanaa, injuring three workers. A day earlier, Yemeni media reported that a woman was killed and children were injured by a Saudi strike on a home in the southwestern Taiz province.
