As Predicted: Despite Truce, Al-Houthi Threatens Saudi Arabia
The leader Ansarullah in Yemen, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, threatened in a speech delivered on Sunday, July 7, 2024, to strike Saudi Arabia’s airports, banks, and ports, claiming that Riyadh is determined to relocate the banks from Sana’a to Aden, away from Houthi-controlled zones, despite the ongoing truce in the country that has been extended multiple times over the past two years.
Al-Houthi said in a speech on the occasion of the new Hijri year about the alleged Saudi plan to relocate banks from Sana’a: “If the American succeeds in entangling you, it is a terrible stupidity and great failure, and it is our natural right to confront any aggressive steps.”i
“We will not stand idly by while our people starve and collapse economically… Saudi Arabia must understand clearly that we will never remain passive when confronted by such stupid acts. They must alter this erroneous path for if not we will respond in kind: banks for banks… the airport in Riyadh for the airport in Sanaa… and seaports for seaports,”ii he continued. He considered that the step that he claimed that Saudi Arabia intends to implement in Yemen comes as a “service to America and Israel.”
This threat comes more than a year after the head of the International Center for Geopolitical and Economic Studies, Dr. Muhammad Walid Youssef, warned in a study published by the center on June 19, 2023, entitled: “Winners and Losers: The First Geopolitical Law in the Middle East,” in which he stated that “the Ansarullah movement will become a great regional military force and an army that cannot be defeated. It will seriously threaten Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries within two or three years,” pointing out that it will “return to launch military campaigns changing the geostrategic rules of engagement, with the war revealing new geopolitical realities […].”
Dr. Youssef pointed out that “the settlements and half-solutions in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government in Aden and the Ansarullah movement (Houthis) in Sana’a will lead to the hoarding and accumulation of wealth, an arms race, the manufacture of large quantities of ballistic and winged missiles, the development of their range, and the provision of microelectronics to direct and control them, along with the construction of new factories for drones, increasing their range and their explosive loads, training many crews to manufacture and use it, and recruiting thousands to join its ranks.”
i https://www.newarab.com/news/houthis-threaten-riyadh-aerial-footage-key-airports
ii https://www.memri.org/jttm/houthi-ansar-allah-movement-threatens-saudi-seaports-and-airports-if-countrydoesnt-backtrac