People ride in a pickup truck during a funeral procession for a Houthi officer in Sanaa, Yemen, Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026. (AP Photo)
Yemen’s Houthis said they attacked a Saudi position in the city of Aden on Oct. 21, with smoke seen rising near the airport, in the third attack in a week on the seat of power of Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government.
“Our armed forces were able to target the Saudi enemy’s operations room in the Badr camp in Aden with a ballistic missile,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said in a statement.
A police official in Aden earlier told AFP there had been a blast “caused by a Houthi missile,” speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Two other security sources in the city told AFP the attack targeted a site near the airport that belonged to forces from the Saudi-led military coalition that has been battling the Houthis.
Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognised Yemeni government have recently come under sustained attack from the Iran-backed Houthis, shifting the focus of the wider Middle East war that erupted with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February.
A day earlier, the Houthis launched a deadly missile attack on the presidential palace in Aden, hitting command centres located inside the Al-Maashiq presidential compound, which is used by government forces and the Saudi-led coalition.
In July, a fragile 2022 truce fell apart after the Houthis allowed an Iranian plane to land in Yemen’s capital Sanaa in defiance of Riyadh’s control over Yemeni airspace, setting off a spate of attacks.
Later, the Houthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia and began hitting its ships, territory and oil facilities, before seizing government-held territory in Yemen along the Red Sea coastline in a lightning campaign.
In response, the Saudi air force has been regularly targeting the Houthis in support of the Yemeni government.
Meanwhile, local Yemeni authorities on Oct. 20 raised the death toll from a Houthi strike a day earlier on a military camp belonging to government forces to 73, as fighting between the foes escalates.
It marked the deadliest attack in weeks as fighting between the Iran-backed Houthis and Yemen’s internationally recognised, Saudi-supported government rages after the collapse of a years-long truce.
The death toll from the Oct. 19 strike on the camp in the energy-rich Shabwa province “increased to 73 martyrs, while search and follow-up efforts are ongoing to discover the fate of 14 missing people,” provincial authorities said in a statement.
Majed al-Nuzaili, spokesperson for the Yemeni armed forces, said on X that the Houthis targeted Shabwa with three ballistic missiles, and that the attack “struck a training center for personnel of security and police agencies.”
