Houthis threaten U.S. if it enters Yemen's war | Hanomansing Live

Saudi Arabia has extended the closure of its main airport in Riyadh. This comes after another deadly attack yesterday by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. A deadly drone and missile strike Saturday marked the deadliest in the kingdom in more than a decade. Canada has issued a travel advisory to avoid all non-essential travel to Saudi Arabia. CBC's Tom Perry has the latest developments from the region. Saudi Arabia's Civil Aviation Authority says operations at the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh remained suspended. That's after a series of strikes by Houthi rebels on the airport over the past number of days. On Sunday, a projectile landed in one of the terminals at the airport, killing one person, injuring nearly a dozen more people. On Saturday, though, was the deadliest attack. In that strike, more than a dozen people were killed. More than 300 people were injured when that strike struck the airport and was not the only one as well, because on Thursday there was yet another strike in which an airliner was destroyed and three other people were killed. So there's been a series of deadly attacks against the King Khalid Airport as well. The King Fahd Airport in a different part of Saudi Arabia has come under fire And the Houthi rebels have really been warning airlines to, say, avoid Saudi airspace because it is an area of military operation. Now, at the same time, the Houthis are saying or blaming Saudi Arabia for airstrikes in an area that they control, including Yemen's capital and including an airport that they say has come under attack. There's been no word from Saudi Arabia on this, about on any of these alleged incidents. But interestingly, in the past couple of days, we've heard that the Iranian foreign minister has been speaking with the Saudi foreign minister. Now, these are two really groups on both sides of this conflict. Iran backs the Houthis and the Saudis back the internationally recognized government in Yemen. But what's being reported is that Iran is offering to try to facilitate talks, to try to de-escalate the situation right now between the Saudi-backed forces and the Houthis. But at this point, these efforts toward de-escalation, they don't seem to be bearing fruit at this point because the tensions between these two bitter rivals remain very high. Tom Perry, CBC News, Jerusalem. Okay, let's get some more analysis on what's happening in the Middle East. And for that, we have reached Thomas Juneau. He is a public and international affairs professor at the University of Ottawa. Thomas, thank you for your time. Thanks for having me. So, as we just heard in Tom's item there, the Houthis are taking responsibility for these attacks. Can you talk a little more about why this is happening? Well, you know, the war in Yemen has been going on for many years, and without going through the full history, In 2015, Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Yemen to roll back the Houthis to push them out of the capital that they had recently seized. For seven years, there was a very violent war. Since 2022, there's been a more or less of a truce between the two sides, but that truce fell apart in the summer, and violence had been slowly escalating since July. And in the past few days in particular, it has really escalated because fundamentally the Houthis remain at war with the internationally recognized government supported by Saudi Arabia, as your correspondent just said. And the two of them have fundamentally different visions for the future of Yemen. I mean, it really, you said it really has escalated. I mean, certainly this is an attack almost daily here and dozens killed and targeting airports, which we know can be economically devastating to a country. Why over the last few days? Do you have any insight there? Well, the Houthis have been quite transparent that their strategy is blockade for blockade, as they call it. Saudi Arabia has been imposing a maritime and air blockade on Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen for over 10 years now. The Houthis control about a third of the country with about two-thirds of the population. And they've been interdicting either maritime or air traffic into and out of Yemen, or at least trying to do so. So what the Houthis are doing here is basically giving Saudi Arabia a taste of its own medicine by telling the Saudis very openly, if we can't use our own airports, you cannot use yours. The Houthis are not going to be able to impose a full blockade on all of Saudi Arabia, a much larger country. But at the very least, what they are doing, and they are succeeding in doing it, is to impose a cost on Saudi Arabia in trying to keep its airports at least partly open. Can you talk to me a bit about that cost? I'm just wondering, I mean, there's already the Canadian warning about non-essential travel. How bad or detrimental might this end up being for Saudi Arabia? It's very bad news for Saudi Arabia. If we go back a few years, you know, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took control of the country in the mid-2010s, there was a period of his foreign policy where he was extremely aggressive, extremely unpredictable, if you go back to 2018 and the dispute with Canada. But since 2020-ish, Mohammed bin Salman has been completely changing Saudi foreign policy and trying to stabilize relations with neighbors to really be able to promote foreign investment, foreign trade, tourism. And for that, he needs stability. So for Saudi Arabia, the reality that Houthi missiles and drones can target Saudi airports, Saudi cities, Saudi critical infrastructure, the Saudi Formula One race four years ago now is a significant threat to Mohammed bin Salman's entire vision of socioeconomic reform. So in that sense, it is very costly. I think that one of those stable partners that they've sought relations with would be the United States. And, of course, now there's a discussion. Is the United States going to enter this conflict? And if it does, I mean, what happens, I guess, to the United States? And how does this back and forth escalate further maybe? Well, that really is one of the most important questions to watch for in the coming hours and days. What emerged in the past few weeks as tensions had been escalating between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis since July, as we said a couple of minutes ago, it emerged that there is a de facto mutual non-aggression pact between Trump and the Houthis, whereby the Houthis agree not to attack American shipping in the Red Sea. And in exchange, the U.S. agrees not to launch direct airstrikes against the Houthis. And this is significant because if you go back to the spring of 2025, the U.S. did have a campaign of three months of airstrikes on the Houthis that did succeed in imposing significant damage on the Houthis assassinating their chief of the general staff for example damaging a lot of military infrastructure so now the question is will the U.S. maintain this non-aggression pact with the Houthis and by doing so basically throwing its Saudi partner under the bus and telling the Saudis we're going to help you a bit indirectly but by and large you're on your own or whether the U.S. will join Saudi Arabia in directly fighting the Houthis in which case we can fully expect the Houthis to relaunch attacks on maritime shipping in the Red Sea which would have all the economic impact that we saw in previous years in terms of damaging maritime shipping, the impact on global supply chains, inflation, oil prices, and so on, a month away from the midterm elections in the U.S. So this is really a difficult dilemma for President Trump at this point. Thomas Junot, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.