Yemen's Houthis just shut down Saudi Arabia's main airport

Yemen's Houthis just warned airlines again. Stay out of Saudi airspace, or else.

This isn't new. They said it back on 5 October too. But now there's a reason to believe them.

A day ago, a strike hit Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport. 12 people died. 309 were wounded.

So the warning landed a few hours after that. And Saudi Arabia has now extended the airport's closure until nine tonight, UK time. Flightradar24 says the same thing. Operations are still down.

Here's the scale of this. Saturday's strike was the third hit on this one airport in a single week. An earlier strike this week killed three Saudi citizens, including a Saudia Airlines captain named Hamoud bin Ali Al-Kalthami. Saturday's strike killed four more Saudis, two people from Bangladesh, and one each from the United States, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Egypt.

Al Jazeera and CNN both describe it as the deadliest attack on Saudi Arabia in more than ten years.

And here's the strange part. The Houthis haven't actually claimed Saturday's strike. The head of their media office posted online that the group had shut down Riyadh's airport. But that's not the same as claiming the attack. The US State Department has blamed the Houthis anyway.

So why would an unclaimed strike come with such a direct warning attached?

Because the warning came first. On 5 October, the Houthi-run Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center said Saudi skies would become a zone of military operations for its forces. A few days ago, Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree warned airlines not to keep flying through Saudi airspace. He left out the airspace over Mecca and Medina. Saturday's strike is the Houthis showing that warning was real.