Saudi Arabia’s air defenses “appear to be coping better with long-range attacks on the kingdom,” defense and security publication IHS Jane’s said, as Saudi Arabia continues to fend off cross-border attacks from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis.
The Saudi Ministry of Energy confirmed Ras Tanura had been attacked on March 7th with a UAV that approached from the sea, but no damage was done, while remnants of a ballistic missile came down in the Aramco oil company’s residential neighborhood in Dhahran, 37 km to the south, causing no casualties. Saudi military spokesman Brigadier Gen Turki al-Maliki said both the bomb-carrying UAV and ballistic missile were shot down before they reached their targets.
Although they have yet to face a threat as challenging as the 14 September 2019 oil facilities attack, IHS Jane’s said, “this was the longest-range ballistic missile attack that has been confirmed to have come from Yemen to date.” Although the missiles were intercepted, the incident marked a serious escalation in Yemen’s Houthi’s attempts to attack Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom said it would continue to work to guarantee global energy security and deter further attacks on its infrastructure in the wake of the attack on the world’s largest oil-export terminal.
“The kingdom will take necessary and deterrent measures to protect its national resources,” Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said in Riyadh, alongside visiting Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. “The failed attempts to target the port of Ras Tanura do not only target the security of the economy and Saudi Arabia. They target the global economy and its oil supplies.”
