Malik: US held Houthi meeting before refusing to extend Saudi military aid

Hormuz closure shifted traffic, drove Houthi advances on Bab al-Mandab

The most detailed new reporting in Malik’s Monday Guardian column concerned US military assistance. Last month, the Trump administration refused to extend military assistance to Saudi Arabia to fight the Houthis, after a meeting of US officials with Houthi representatives who assured them the group would not attack US ships in the Red Sea, only Saudi vessels, Malik reported. Saudi Arabia now faces “a long, intractable war with a resourceful and impassioned antagonist, one willing to sustain a high degree of pain in ways that Riyadh can’t match without orienting itself entirely towards war,” she wrote. Malik reported that the 2015 Saudi-led campaign against the Houthis suggests the renewed war “will claim thousands of lives with only a remote possibility of a decisive outcome.”

Malik framed the refusal as part of a broader Gulf security unraveling. Over the past year, “the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed,” she wrote, while “the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.” She pointed to two earlier attacks as turning points: just over a year before the Riyadh strike, Iran fired missiles at a Qatari airbase hosting American troops in retaliation for US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, preceded by what Malik described as “a degree of warning and coordination that signalled this was a face-saving measure on the part of the Iranians.” Later in 2025, Israel struck Doha, targeting Hamas members and killing five Palestinians and one Qatari citizen, with no comparable warning, according to the column. The Doha strike marked “the beginning of the end of a longstanding norm and expectation – that there was a sanctity to Gulf lives and sovereignty, one secured by the management of the relationship with Iran and alliances with the US,” Malik wrote.

Saturday’s missile strike on King Khalid international airport in Riyadh killed at least 13 people and wounded 300, according to Malik’s column, current as of her writing. She described the toll as “bewilderingly high” for a country unaccustomed to such fatalities on its own soil and said it was “likely to prompt a bloody response.” She called the strike “the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country” since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February 2026.

A senior Houthi official told Malik that Saturday’s attack took place “so that the world understands” that Yemeni civilian infrastructure has been, and is being, targeted by the Saudis, “gesturing towards that sense that Riyadh treats Yemeni lives as cheap,” according to the column. The Houthis are backed by Iran, but “they are not empty proxies for Iran,” Malik wrote; the group has “domestic ambitions and sharp regional animosities, particularly against the House of Saud, which they see an imperious and arrogant master to whom they shall never submit.”

Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran “drew the Gulf once and for all into the fray,” Malik wrote. In retaliation for what Tehran perceived as political, military, and logistical support for the campaign against it, Iran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, targeting military sites, energy facilities, and desalination plants, according to the column. The disruptions shuttered schools for months and closed airports and airspace, Malik reported. The most damaging consequence, she wrote, has been the disruption of the Gulf states’ integration into international tourism, business, sports, and entertainment; Gulf rulers spent billions on Formula One, golf, and boxing franchises and tournaments — investments “a flurry of cheap drones” had put at risk.

Malik traced the Yemen war back to 2014, when Iran-backed Houthi rebels, seeking greater autonomy in minority Shia homelands, took over the capital, Sana’a. In 2015, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia launched “a brutal campaign to dislodge the Houthis from territories they had gained,” intensifying a grinding civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, according to the column. The war de-escalated in 2022 with a de facto but unformalised division of the country between the Houthis and an internationally recognised, Saudi-backed government, followed by rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Malik reported.

The 2026 war against Iran opened strategic opportunities for the Houthis, “triggering a surge of Houthi advancement in Yemen,” Malik wrote. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz shifted commercial traffic along Yemen’s coast, she reported, prompting the Houthis to make advances and seize territory to control the now-crucial Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea. Tensions escalated five months into the war, with Saudi Arabia intensifying strikes against the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government bombing its own airport in Sana’a to prevent an Iranian plane from landing, according to the column.

Malik also framed the crisis as “another consequence of Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, and what followed in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.” The final piece that was stabilising the region’s tense equilibriums fell away when Trump decided that the safety and security of the US’s Gulf allies was secondary to his Iran “excursion,” as he called it, she wrote. “The limits of relying on the US security umbrella became clear both to allies and enemies,” Malik reported. The Houthi resurgence, Malik wrote, “represents a new reality in a region that is bewildered and losing lives and capital, stuck between old alliances that no longer work and new hostilities that are too calamitous to confront.”

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist. The Guardian published her column on October 12, 2026.