The sound of multiple explosions rattled Saudi Arabia’s capital on Thursday morning as a war between the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen and a Saudi-led military coalition intensified.
It was not immediately clear what had caused the explosions in the capital, Riyadh. The Saudi authorities did not immediately respond to questions about the situation.
A Times reporter in Riyadh heard several blasts in quick succession. Two residents, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were aware that workers at an office tower in the city had been told to evacuate. In recent days, Saudi authorities have told residents not to share information related to missile and drone attacks, warning them of legal consequences.
Saudi Arabia is reeling a day after the authorities there said that strikes on airports in Riyadh and Abha, a city in the south of the kingdom, had killed three people and injured dozens more. Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesman, said early Thursday that the group had attacked Riyadh’s airport with a ballistic missile.
The attacks were the deadliest the kingdom has faced since it began bombing Houthi positions in Yemen earlier this year in what it initially described as retaliation for Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia.
The Yemeni government, backed by Saudi warplanes, began a military offensive this week to retake strategically important territory along the Red Sea from the Houthi militia.
A spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen said overnight that it had retaliated for the airport strikes by attacking dozens of Houthi military sites, including missile storage sites and command centers. The Houthis did not immediately respond to that claim.
The latest round of fighting has plunged Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, longtime enemies, back into open conflict. Nearly 200,000 Yemenis have been displaced by the conflict since September, when fighting intensified, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia previously led a disastrous bombing campaign against the Houthis in 2015 in a bid to restore Yemen’s internationally-recognized government, which had been driven out of the capital, Sanaa, by the group. The war lasted years, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, until the two sides agreed to a tenuous truce in 2022.
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