Tabnak – Two years and a half after the start of the Saudi invasion of Yemen, the Yemeni movement Ansarullah has gained the capacity to target strategic positions deep inside the Saudi soil. The latest Yemeni drone attack against Saudi oil facilities is expected to drastically change the equations on the ground.
Yemeni drones have hit two oil facilities of Saudi Arabia's state oil giant Aramco in the country's east, causing huge fires before dawn on Saturday.
A spokesman for Saudi Arabia's interior ministry said in a statement that the attacks targeted two Aramco factories in Abqaiq and Khurais. The statement did not identify the source of the attacks, but Yemen's Houthi movement later claimed responsibility in an announcement on Al Masirah TV.
The movement's military spokesman General Yahya Sare'e said 10 drones were deployed against the sites in Abqaiq and Khurais, and pledged to widen the range of attacks on Saudi Arabia.
"This was one of the largest operations which our forces have carried out deep inside Saudi Arabia. It came after careful intelligence and cooperation with honorable and free people inside Saudi Arabia," he said without elaboration.
Saudi oil production and exports have been disrupted after the drone attacks. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Saudi government is shutting down half of its oil production after Saturday’s incident.
The closure will impact almost five million barrels of crude production a day, about 5% of the world’s daily oil production, the WSJ reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
James Rogers, a drone and security expert and a visiting research fellow at the Department of International Security Studies at Yale University, told CNN that the United Nations has been investigating the drones, which have a range of 1,450 kilometers (900 miles). He said the range means that Houthi forces can target sites in Saudi Arabia from their stronghold in Yemen.
"It is quite an impressive, yet worrying, technological feat," he said. "Long-range precision strikes are not easy to achieve and to cause the substantial fires in Abqaiq and Khurais highlights that this drone has a large explosive yield."
Houthi fighters and their allies in Yemen's army have carried out similar attacks in recent months in retaliation for the kingdom's airstrikes in the impoverished nation and its crippling economic siege on the country.
The incident comes nearly a month after Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities in Shaybah, the kingdom’s largest strategic oil reserve near the UAE border, were targeted by Yemeni forces in a major drone attack.
Yemeni forces also launched a successful raid on a major pipeline spanning the kingdom in May. Sare'e on Saturday pledged to widen the range of retaliatory attacks on Saudi Arabia.
