Pepe Escobar: Yemen goes for the (Saudi) jugular

by Pepe Escobar [10-14-2026] Pepe Escobar(bio).

The House of Saud has received a stunning warning from Ansarallah and the Yemeni Armed Forces: if you continue to attack us, you will lose your oil infrastructure and your whole economy.

That’s not a threat. That’s a fact.

Cue the Ultimate Saudi Decider MbS and his coterie of advisers insisting on attacking a Yemeni Oil Company depot in Sana’a. It had already been announced that the facility was empty. Still, the Saudis needed a photo op – flames included.

As a result, Saudi oil infrastructure was set to burn. Ballistic missiles and drones from the Yemeni Armed Forces targeted the Aramco headquarters in Dammam; the Aramco refinery in Riyadh; and the Aramco refinery in Rabigh.

Oil export revenues account for over 60% of Saudi fiscal income. The military budget, the royal family’s absurd spending sprees, vanity projects such as NEOM, all that depends on oil exports.

ARAMCO in real terms is the most valuable company on the planet, pumping and commercializing the bulk of the black lifeblood running through the arteries of successive Vampire Balls.

Yet now we have those “terrorists in sandals” – the demonization brandished by the Epstein Syndicate – attacking the Vampire with a thousand little silver stakes, anointed with fresh garlic, possibly day after day. The result will inevitably be high-priced – and scarce – black blood for years, once the inevitable manipulations collapse.

The Axis of Resistance now de facto controls both of Saudi Arabia’s oil export routes: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab.

In the Strait of Hormuz, the IRGC Navy is serially striking and setting ablaze an array of petro tankers, including a supertanker carrying 2 million barrels of Saudi crude.

It’s quite straightforward: anyone turning off navigation and identification systems will be treated as a hostile target and inexorably destroyed by the IRGC Navy.

In parallel, the Yemeni Armed Forces control the high ground on both sides of the Bab al-Mandab. Every attack by ersatz Saudi/mercenary forces on the Yemeni grip has failed.

If the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab are totally, simultaneously closed – that’s not yet the case – the House of Saud cannot export a single drop of oil. And yes, its whole economy will collapse.

Saudi airports have already been paralyzed: King Khalid in Riyadh, Najran, Jazan, Yanbu, Al-Jawf, Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz, Taif, Dammam. Ansarallah is implementing the finer points of “a blockade against a blockade”: the actual counterpunch to Saudi Arabia’s decade-long siege of Sana’a’s airport.

No wonder the Arab world is awash in jokes praising October as Yemeni Awareness Month in Riyadh.

The only truly real army across the Arab world

MbS would have only one reasonable choice: end this war – which he restarted – and lift the blockade on Yemen. Ansarallah does not want to grab Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth; they want Riyadh to stop killing – and imposing famines on – Yemenis.

Yet Saudi Arabia, the US and the death cult in West Asia can only conceive of Yemen as ruled by an easily pliable puppet government. That explains the composition of the current war cell in Riyadh: Saudi, CENTCOM and death cult advisers, including a major general.

Add to it the murky Mecca Defense Alliance – which boils down to a Zionist-tinged approximation of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan to go after the Ansarallah warriors. Pure Divide and Rule – complete with Saudi functionaries defending an attack on a Muslim nation to protect Israeli interests.

At least both Ankara and Islamabad are starting to realize that if they ditch their current “defensive” kabuki and intervene offensively against Ansarallah, they will instantly be construed as legitimate targets.

MbS, with his CENTCOM and Israeli advisers, is insisting on war against the only truly real army across the Arab world, capable of conducting a war of attrition and manufacturing its own precision weapons: certainly not a bunch of posers brandishing billion-dollar toys they can’t de facto operate. The Yemeni army can crush the Saudi army for breakfast.

Everyone remembers how in 2024 and 2025, the Yemeni Armed Forces chased out of the Red Sea two successive American carrier strike groups. The US Navy was deeply traumatized. As traumatized as the USS George Washington’s close encounter in early September with a new Iranian anti-ship missile, which forced it to escape to the southern Indian Ocean.

There’s no way to “invade” Yemen. Geography talks, especially the rugged mountains in the northwest controlled by “the Houthis.” Unlike the facile demonization coined by Zionist media, the Houthis – actually Ansarallah – are in fact a complex religious, political, cultural, and military organization, with a sophisticated administrative structure governing the capital Sana’a and most of Yemen.

The Houthis are not technically Shi’ite; they are Zaydi, relatively close to Sunnis. “Houthi” comes from the Houthi family – from the city of Houth – which founded Ansarallah and played the key role in the overthrow of dictator Ali Saleh, who ruled Yemen for 34 years as a lowly puppet of Saudi Arabia and the US. Ansarallah got rid of Ali Saleh in 2011 and took control of Sana’a and a great deal of Yemen in 2014.

Then, in 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a war on Yemen, at the same time propping up a puppet “internationally recognized” government – set up at a five-star hotel in Riyadh. As I saw for myself last year, Riyadh bombed Yemen indiscriminately for 11 years. Numbers of civilian deaths vary from 60,000 – including children, women, the elderly – to hundreds of thousands, plus the starvation of hundreds of thousands more.

Still, Ansarallah would not be defeated – even as Riyadh continues to weaponize mercenary gangs in southern Yemen.

As I discussed extensively last year with members of the Political Council, Iran does provide Ansarallah with weapons and intel support, but Ansarallah’s decisions revolve around a structure completely independent of Iran, presided over by Leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi.

The bill is now way more expensive

As the escalation ladder seems to run out of control, Ansarallah has now increased the price of the bill for peace: not only the end of the blockade and full Saudi withdrawal from Yemen, but payment of compensation for everything destroyed since 2015.

And if that doesn’t happen, get ready for the three southern Saudi provinces – Najran, Jizan and Asir – to enter the chat: actually Yemeni lands, stolen in 1934 by the British.

Ansarallah’s got what it takes to easily reconquer the three provinces. If and when that happens, that will be the beginning of the end of the House of Saud.

As the Arab street saying goes: “Ya Rab” (“Oh, God!”), but in the sense of “Oh Lord, make it happen.” Vast sections of the Arab street, across the spectrum, cannot but pray for a West Asia future built on the ashes of Fifth-Columnist petro-sheikhs.