The Saudi authorities acknowledged this evening, Monday, that there had been an attack on a station for the distribution of petroleum products in the city of Jeddah, and said that it led to a fire in one of the tanks without injuries, after the Yemeni Houthi group announced in the morning that the station had been targeted by a winged missile.
The spokesman for the leadership of the Saudi-Emirati coalition, Colonel Turki Al-Maliki, said - in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency - that the attack "targeted global energy supplies and security."
Al-Maliki believed that the attack was an extension of the attacks that targeted Aramco's oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais (east of the Kingdom) on September 14, 2019.
The coalition said that Iran had provided the Houthis with specific weapons such as winged missiles (cruise) and explosive drones.
Fire at the station
The Saudi Press Agency quoted - from a source in the Ministry of Energy - that the fire at the fuel distribution station north of Jeddah was triggered by a projectile, and confirmed that the firefighting teams managed to extinguish the fire, and there were no injuries or loss of life.
He added that Saudi Aramco's supplies of fuel to its customers were not affected by the attack.
The Houthi military spokesman, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, had announced - earlier - that an Aramco distribution station had been targeted in Jeddah.
With the help and support of God, the missile force was able to target the Aramco distribution station in Jeddah with a winged missile, Quds 2, which recently entered service after successful operational tests in the Saudi rear, which have not been announced yet, and
thanks to God, the injury was very accurate and ambulances and firefighting vehicles rushed to the target location.
pic.twitter.com/3xooqUQfLv
- Brigadier General Yahya Saree (@ army21ye) November 23, 2020
He added that the attack was carried out with a winged (cruise) missile of the "Quds 2" type, and that the injury was accurate, and Saree called on foreign companies and their workers to stay away from vital places.
He pointed out that the targeting of Aramco in Jeddah came in response to what he called the continuation of the siege and aggression in Yemen, and in the context of what the Houthis promised days before the implementation of large-scale operations in the Saudi depth.
On the other hand, Nasser Zuhair, an international relations advisor at the Geneva Center for Studies, said that the Houthi attacks on Aramco facilities in Jeddah were a message from Tehran that if Iran was targeted, it would "set the region on fire," as he put it.
Zuhair added that the Houthis do not have technology at this level, and if they had them, they would have used them before, he said.