The Egyptian Parliament on Monday voted to give President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the authority to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia, where they would help the kingdom repel attacks from the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents of Yemen.
Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) said October 27 that they had repelled an attack by Saudi-backed forces toward the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, reporting heavy casualties and the destruction of several military vehicles as fighting continued in western Lahj.
In a statement, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the Houthis’ military spokesman, said the forces were advancing from the south toward the strait under the supervision of Saudi officer Badr al-Harbi, whom he identified as commander of an advanced operational base in Aden.
The Houthis struck the troop concentrations with ballistic missiles and heavy weapons, causing large numbers of deaths and injuries, while ambulances rushed to the targeted areas, Saree said. The spokesman added that Houthi forces went on to destroy a number of military vehicles and thwart the advance.
“We warn those being misled against responding to calls from the Saudi enemy and its officers, who are pushing them into the furnaces of death,” Saree concluded.
The latest failed Saudi-backed attack follows a series of reported Houthi advances in western Lahj over the past several days.
On October 25, the Houthi-aligned Yemen Press Agency, citing southern political figure Adel al-Hasani, reported that the group had secured Wadi al-Nabiq after fierce clashes and was advancing toward al-Shatein, in the al-Mudharaba and Ras al-Arah districts.
The very next day, the agency reported that the Houthis had advanced beyond the Kahboub mountain range after positions held by the 31st Amaliqa Brigade collapsed, with remaining fighters withdrawing toward Aden.
Reports that surfaced around the same time Saree issued his latest statement described a further Houthi push toward al-Suqayyah following the reported gains around Kahboub.
The fighting has focused on the highlands and coastal routes of western Lahj, where control of the Kahboub range and surrounding areas could strengthen the Houthis’ positions along the southern approaches to Bab al-Mandab. The group captured the strategic coastal region in a lightning offensive last month.
Satellite info has aided strikes by Houthis and Iraqi militias, according to intelligence firm and Saudi and Houthi sources; targets included crucial Saudi pipeline
For nearly half a century, Iran’s adversaries have tried to isolate it, intimidate it, sanction it into submission and bomb it into irrelevance. Now, in a remarkable inversion of regional power politics, three countries historically invested in its containment have arrived in Tehran to discuss their security with the very state they were supposed to marginalise.
The country they could not defeat is becoming the country they cannot afford to ignore.
Yesterday, Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın met Iranian officials in an encounter whose diplomatic courtesies barely concealed its strategic significance.
The Mecca Pact, the joint defence agreement that Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed in Mecca in August, was supposed to consolidate a formidable Sunni-led defence alignment. Yet its representatives have come to Tehran confronting an inconvenient reality: Iran cannot be excluded from regional security merely because Washington and its partners find its independence intolerable.
Apparently, the Islamic Republic has become considerably more respectable since demonstrating that it cannot be conveniently eliminated.
This is the distinction between military destruction and strategic defeat that Washington and Israel persistently confuse. Overwhelming firepower can devastate infrastructure, assassinate officials and inflict enormous suffering. It cannot manufacture political submission.
Iran has survived military confrontation, retained retaliatory capabilities and forced neighbouring governments to reconsider the potentially catastrophic consequences of another war.
Survival becomes strategic victory when your adversaries must reorganise their calculations around it.
For Saudi Arabia, the reckoning is particularly humiliating. Riyadh spent decades treating American military supremacy as an insurance policy against Iranian influence. Yemen exposed the bankruptcy of that assumption.
Ansar Allah, Yemen’s Houthi movement, demonstrated that superior arsenals cannot guarantee security against an adversary capable of imposing disproportionate costs. The Saudi monarchy possesses spectacular weaponry, immense wealth and powerful patrons. Yet none of these has eliminated its vulnerability to Yemeni retaliation.
Now Riyadh finds itself seeking Tehran’s cooperation to manage a conflict that its military superiority has failed to resolve.
Pakistan’s predicament is scarcely less revealing. Munir presides over a military establishment accustomed to presenting strategic dependency as diplomatic sophistication. Islamabad’s defence commitments to Riyadh now threaten to entangle Pakistan in confrontations with Iran and Yemen that serve neither its geography nor its national interests.
The Mecca Pact promises collective security. Its less advertised feature is collective exposure to somebody else’s strategic miscalculations.
Munir must now reconcile his obligations to Saudi patrons with the inconvenient realities of Iranian power. It is an awkward assignment for an establishment that has repeatedly mistaken proximity to foreign power for genuine strategic independence.
Türkiye confronts a different calculation but reaches a similar conclusion. Ankara understands that NATO membership, military capabilities and regional ambitions cannot abolish geography. No credible security architecture can be constructed by pretending Iran is dispensable.
The deeper contradiction, however, lies within the Mecca Pact itself.
Its members seek the reassurance of collective defence while attempting to avoid being dragged into another American-Israeli confrontation. An attack on one may formally constitute an attack on all. But such commitments become considerably less attractive when Iranian retaliation, Yemeni escalation and vulnerable Gulf infrastructure enter the equation.
Collective defence sounds magnificent until someone presents the collective bill.
Iran’s achievement is not that its neighbours have embraced its revolutionary worldview. They have not. Saudi Arabia remains deeply connected to Washington, Pakistan continues its elaborate balancing act, and Türkiye remains embedded in NATO.
The significance runs deeper: these governments increasingly recognise that excluding Iran from regional security may expose them to greater dangers than engaging it.
That realisation strikes at the foundations of the American security paradigm.
For decades, Washington cultivated regional dependence on American protection while organising strategic anxieties around Iranian power. Now those same governments are exploring cooperation with the country they were encouraged to regard as an existential threat.
The irony is devastating. Decades of attempting to contain Iran may have helped establish its indispensability.
And Tehran, displaying the composure of a state conscious of its diplomatic leverage, has welcomed its visitors graciously. No triumphalist declarations are necessary. The spectacle speaks adequately for itself.
The Mecca Pact arrived ostensibly to discuss regional stability. What it encountered was the strategic consequence of its own failed assumptions.
Iran did not have to join the alliance. The alliance had to come to Iran.
Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) on October 27 claimed a series of missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, including a ballistic missile strike on the Ras Tanura refinery that it said caused massive fires.
Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the group’s military spokesman, said in a statement that the group had struck the refinery in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province with a ballistic missile, describing the strike as precise and claiming it caused “massive fires” at the site.
Bloomberg News, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Saudi Arabia had contained a fire near the Ras Tanura oil terminal early in the day. The extent of the damage was unclear, and Saudi authorities had not confirmed that the refinery itself had been struck.
A resident of the nearby city of Al Khobar told Agence France-Presse that he received a mobile phone alert before hearing an explosion.
In a separate statement, Saree said that Houthi forces had targeted two military transport aircraft with ballistic missiles, one at Najran Airport and the other at King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait. He said both operations had “achieved their objectives successfully.”
Saree subsequently claimed that a ballistic missile had struck Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense in Riyadh, describing the impact as a “direct hit.”
In the fourth statement, he said the Houthis had targeted Abha International Airport with a drone, claiming the strike was precise and had disrupted air traffic at the airport.
Saudi authorities had not immediately confirmed the claimed strikes on the military aircraft, Defense Ministry or Abha airport.
The Saudi-led coalition said during the day that it had intercepted and destroyed three ballistic missiles launched toward the kingdom’s Eastern Province and four drones directed toward its southern regions.
Saudi Civil Defense issued early-warning alerts in the Eastern Province and Kharj governorate before announcing that the danger had passed.
In a separate report, Reuters said the coalition had also announced the interception and destruction of two ballistic missiles launched toward Riyadh. Saudi Civil Defense authorities briefly issued an air raid alert in the capital.
The latest Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia come amid reports that the kingdom is seeking a negotiated end to the confrontation. Israel Hayom reported on October 26, citing unnamed Gulf diplomatic sources, that Riyadh had offered the group $1 billion through Iran in exchange for a ceasefire and an end to strikes on Saudi territory.
Riad, 27 oct (Prensa Latina) La coalición militar liderada por Arabia Saudita informó hoy la interceptación de cuatro drones y tres misiles balísticos lanzados hacia el territorio del reino, que atribuyó al movimiento hutí de Yemen.
emen's Iran-aligned Houthis said on Tuesday they had hit Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura oil refinery, the ?biggest in the kingdom, with a ballistic missile.
Egipto sella su participación militar en la guerra de Yemen a petición de Arabia Saudí, en medio de crecientes críticas que tildan ambas intervenciones de ilegales bajo el derecho internacional.
In front of an audience at the Newport Beach Film Festival, the legendary writer turned embattled director discussed revisiting Facebook 16 years after 'The Social Network,' his thoughts about 'The West Wing' today ("I always want to rekindle the show") and re-writing 'A Few Good Men' 40 years after writing it — this time sober.
La agenda oficial del encuentro abordó las consecuencias del conflicto impulsado por Estados Unidos e Israel, la situación en Palestina y el Líbano, así como el panorama militar en Yemen.