Drones attacked the world’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco early on Saturday, the kingdom’s interior ministry said, sparking a huge fire at a processor vital to global energy supplies.
A military spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the strikes.
Yahia Sarie made the announcement on Saturday in a televised address carried by the Houthi movement’s al-Masirah satellite news channel.
He said the rebels had sent 10 drones to attack the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khurais oil field. He said attacks against the kingdom would get worse if the war in Yemen continued.
“The only option for the Saudi government is to stop attacking us,” he said. A Saudi-led coalition has been at war with the rebels since March 2015.
It was unclear whether there were any injuries in the attacks, or whether they would affect the country’s oil production. They are, however, likely to heighten tensions in the region, where Saudi Arabia and Iran are effectively fighting a proxy war in Yemen, and Tehran is at loggerheads with Washington over the latter’s withdrawal from its nuclear deal with world powers.
Online videos apparently shot in Abqaiq included the sound of gunfire in the background. Smoke rose over the skyline and flames could be seen in the distance at the oil processing facility.
The fires began after the sites were targeted by drones, the interior ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. It said an investigation was under way.
Saudi Aramco describes its Abqaiq facility as the largest crude oil stabilisation plant in the world. It is thought to be able to process up to 7m barrels of crude a day.
Quick guide The Yemen conflict
Yemen has been troubled by civil wars for decades, but the current conflict intensified in March 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition intervened on behalf of the internationally recognised government against Houthi rebels aligned with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The war is widely regarded as having turned a poor country into a humanitarian catastrophe. Riyadh expected its air power, backed by regional coalition including the United Arab Emirates, could defeat the Houthi insurgency in a matter of months.
Instead some reports suggest nearly 100,000 people have died. Others put the death toll much lower, but fighting this year alone has displaced 250,000 people. There are more than 30 active front lines. A total of 80% of the population – more than 24 million people – need assistance and protection, including 10 million who rely on food aid to survive.
Its roots lie in the Arab spring. Pro-democracy protesters took to the streets in a bid to force the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to end his 33-year rule. He responded with economic concessions but refused to resign.
By March 2011, tensions on the streets of the capital city, Sana’a, resulted in protesters dying at the hands of the military.
Following an internationally brokered deal, there was a transfer of power in November to the vice-president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, paving the way for elections in February 2012 – in which he was the only candidate to lead a transitional government. Hadi’s attempts at constitutional and budget reforms were rejected by Houthi rebels from the north.
The Houthis belong to a small branch of Shia Muslims known as Zaydis. They captured the capital, forcing Hadi to flee eventually to Riyadh.
The UN brokered an agreement in Stockholm in December 2018 to demilitarise the Red Sea city of Hodeidah, and after five months of tortuous talks a small part of the agreement has been implemented on the ground. The Houthis had promised a two-phase redeployment out of the city, and agreed that an alternative force – poorly defined in the Stockholm agreement – would take over security in the areas they vacated. But talks between the Houthis and the UAE-backed government forces stalled over the details.
Faced by an impasse, the UN sanctioned a unilateral Houthi withdrawal from the three main ports on Yemen’s Red Sea coast – Hodeidah, Ras Issa and Saleef. The Yemeni government described the withdrawal as a sham, saying the Houthis had merely rebadged their fighters as coastguards. They pressed for the resignation of Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy for Yemen. Not everyone in the Yemen government agreed with this analysis and the foreign minister quit.
No progress has been made on the second phase of redeployment, or the exchange of political prisoners. Griffiths is now trying to secure enough progress in Hodeidah to get off this hook and say the time is ripe for wider political talks on a transitional government to be held in Bonn.
Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor
Militants have targeted the plant in the past. Suicide bombers claiming to be from al-Qaida tried but failed to attack it in February 2006.
The Khurais oil field is thought to produce more than 1m barrels of crude a day. It has estimated reserves of more than 20bn barrels, according to Aramco.
There was no immediate impact on global oil prices, because markets are closed for the weekend. Benchmark Brent crude had been trading at just above $60 a barrel.
Abqaiq is 205 miles (330km) north-east of Riyadh.
A Saudi-led coalition has been at war with the Houthi movement in Yemen since March 2015. The Iranian-backed rebels hold the capital, Sana’a, and other territory in the Arab world’s poorest country.
The war has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The violence has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine and more than 90,000 people have been killed since 2015, according to the US-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks the conflict.
Houthi rebels have been using drones in combat since since the start of the Saudi-led war. The first appeared to be off-the-shelf, hobby-kit-style drones, but later versions have been nearly identical to Iranian models. Tehran denies supplying the rebels with weapons, but the west and Gulf Arab nations say it does.
The rebels have flown drones into the radar arrays of Saudi Arabia’s Patriot missile batteries, according to Conflict Armament Research, disabling them and allowing them to fire ballistic missiles into the kingdom unchallenged.
They launched drone attacks targeting Saudi Arabia’s crucial east-west pipeline in May as tensions heightened between Iran and the US.
Houthi drones also struck the Shaybah oil field in August. The field produces 1m barrels of crude a day near the Saudi border with the United Arab Emirates.
UN investigators have suggested that the rebels’ new UAV-X dronemay have a range of up to 930 miles (1,500 kilometres), meaning they would be able to reach Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
