Proceeding As Planned

A Passenger Terminal

I read about Riyadh on Sunday morning with a coffee going cold on a rock ledge in a cave in rural Spain, which is roughly as far from an international arrivals hall as a man can sensibly get. Twelve dead, according to the Saudi civil aviation authority, and 309 injured, some of them critically. Four of the dead were Saudi nationals, and one was an American citizen. The Saudi-led coalition says the Houthi strike on King Khalid International Airport targeted a passenger terminal, and I want to sit with that phrase for a moment before anyone rushes in to explain it to me.

A passenger terminal is the most ordinary building in the modern world. It is where people queue for coffee they don’t really want, argue with self-service kiosks that have never once worked the first time, hug relatives they haven’t seen in two years and lose the phone charger they will mourn all the way to their connection. Nobody in that building is a combatant. Some of them were going home, some were going to work, and a good many, I’d wager, were simply bored… which is the natural state of anyone in an airport, right up until the moment it isn’t.

I spent a large part of my working life in the RAF Police and then in senior security management, and if that career teaches you anything, it’s that you can harden an airfield, but you can never make a terminal truly safe from someone who has decided to treat it as a target. The entire purpose of a terminal is to let the public in. That is precisely what makes hitting one so cheap, so effective, and so utterly contemptible.

The Airport-for-Airport Equation

Saturday wasn’t a bolt from the blue. It was the end of a week. On Wednesday, the Saudi aviation authority said Houthi strikes on the airports at Riyadh and Abha had killed three people and injured 36. On Thursday came two more attacks on King Khalid, one on airport facilities and one on a parked Saudia aircraft, killing three Saudi citizens, among them the airline’s pilot, Captain Humoud Al-Kalthami. The plane was on the ground with no passengers aboard, which is the only mercy in the whole sorry week. When Saudi air defences shot down one of the incoming missiles over the city, the debris damaged a kindergarten and a medical centre. The Houthis then issued what they called a final warning to every international airline to stop flying through Saudi airspace.

The Houthis have a name for all this. They call it the blockade-for-blockade equation, or more bluntly, airport for airport. The grievance underneath it is real. Saudi Arabia has enforced restrictions on Yemeni airspace for years, and in July the airport in Sanaa was bombed, an attack the Saudi-backed Yemeni government owned up to, saying it was stopping an unauthorised Iranian plane from landing. The Houthi-run health ministry says Saudi airstrikes have killed 91 people in Yemen since the third of September, mostly women and children.

After Saturday, a senior Houthi official, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, explained that the attack was meant to teach the world that airports, hospitals, markets, wedding halls and mourning halls in Yemen are civilian places that must not be hit, and that the same rules should apply everywhere. Read that slowly. It is a perfectly sound principle, and I’d sign it tomorrow. It is also being delivered by ballistic missile into a departures hall, which rather undoes the lesson. You cannot persuade the world that civilian buildings are sacred by destroying one, any more than you can win an argument about shouting by shouting louder. Reciprocity in war has a way of sounding like justice right up until you notice it only ever runs downhill.

Whose Dead Get the First Paragraph

Here is the bit that made me put the coffee down. In the New York Times report I was reading, the Riyadh dead are in the headline, the opening line and the subheading. The 91 dead in Yemen appear several paragraphs further down, carefully attributed to a Houthi-affiliated ministry spokesman. That caveat is fair, and I’d want it there. But notice where the numbers sit. One set of dead is the story. The other set is context.

It goes further than one article. Hours after Thursday’s attack on Riyadh, Saudi jets struck Sanaa, and the Houthi-run health ministry said six people were wounded, women and children among them. In most of the coverage I found, that got a single sentence, tucked in after the vow of a firm response. I’m not suggesting anyone in a newsroom sat down and decided Yemeni lives were worth less. It’s subtler and more depressing than that. News value follows the passport and the postcode. Riyadh’s airport is where energy executives and investment bankers land; one of the dead was American, and within hours the US Secretary of State was posting about it. Yemen’s dead have no Secretary of State with a social media account and a global audience. They have a health ministry nobody trusts, and a slot in paragraph seven.

I’ll own my part in this too. I read the Riyadh figures first, and I felt them first. That’s the trouble with the way we’re fed these stories… the hierarchy of grief is built before we’ve finished our first cup, and most of us never notice we’ve swallowed it whole.

A Decade of the Same Lesson

If this feels familiar, it’s because we’ve watched the film before and the ending didn’t change. In 2015 the Houthis took Sanaa and routed Yemen’s government, and Saudi Arabia led a bombing campaign to put things back the way they were. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis died over the years that followed, from violence, hunger and disease. The Houthis did not. They came out of it ruling northern Yemen, battle-hardened and with very little left to lose. A truce in 2022 brought a brittle sort of quiet, which held until the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February and the whole region caught fire.

Since then the dominoes have fallen in roughly the order you’d expect. The Sanaa airport strike in July. The Houthi embargo on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea, which matters enormously now that the Iran war has throttled the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea has become the kingdom’s back door for oil exports. Last month the Houthis seized Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline in a lightning offensive, tightening their grip on the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Last weekend the Saudi-backed government announced a campaign to take back everything the Houthis have held for twelve years, and the Saudi bombers went back to work.

Washington, meanwhile, is deciding. Asked about Saturday’s attack, President Trump said the United States would make a decision about intervening, and offered nothing more. It’s worth remembering that he bombed the Houthis last year, burned through munitions at around a billion dollars in the first month, and declared a swift victory. Here we are. The analysts quoted in the coverage reckon the Houthis are calculating that they can inflict more pain on Saudi Arabia than Saudi Arabia can inflict on them, and I suspect they’re right. When you rule a country whose infrastructure was flattened years ago, the threat of more flattening loses some of its bite. You can’t bomb rubble into submission, though Lord knows enough people have tried.

And now for the part that would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque. Riyadh is meant to be the future. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has spent a decade selling the city as a global hub for travel and business, and for most of this year it worked rather well. Semafor’s bureau chief in the city noted that Riyadh had been the Gulf’s escape route from the Iran war, the place that stayed calm while everywhere else got loud. This week it got loud. Hundreds of flights were cancelled. Lufthansa, Air India and Pakistan International Airlines suspended services. Companies in the shiny King Abdullah Financial District told their staff to work from home. Offices, schools and the Expo 2030 construction site near the airport were evacuated. American officials now need special approval just to use the capital’s airport.

Against that backdrop, the organisers of the energy congress opening in Riyadh on Sunday emailed delegates late on Friday to say the event would go ahead as planned, with alternative travel options including coordinated flights on Saudia, the national carrier. On Saturday, Saudia’s own flights were among those being diverted. The Future Investment Initiative, the crown prince’s annual gathering of world leaders, billionaires and top executives, is still on the calendar for later this month, and at the time of writing nobody has announced any changes. Some of us have long memories. In 2018, that same summit went ahead after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, minus a fair few big names, because the show must always go on.

Semafor put the commercial logic with refreshing candour: staying away risks offending the kingdom, and any firm that doesn’t stand with Saudi Arabia now could miss out when the economy recovers. So there it is. Twelve people are dead in a terminal, more than three hundred are injured, and the question in a great many boardrooms this weekend isn’t whether it’s safe to fly in, but what it might cost them not to. I’ve written memos in my time that tried to make a bad decision sound prudent, and I recognise the genre. “Proceeding as planned” is the corporate equivalent of whistling past the graveyard, except someone else is in the graveyard and you’re whistling on expenses.

Why It Reaches a Cave in Spain

You might reasonably ask why a retired copper living in a hillside cave should care about a missile in a Saudi departures hall. I asked myself the same thing, mostly to get out of writing this. The honest answer is geography. The world’s oil and a vast share of its shipping squeeze through a handful of narrow bits of sea, and two of the most important ones are now in play at the same time. The Strait of Hormuz has been throttled by the Iran war since the spring. The Red Sea, the obvious workaround, has a militia sitting on its southern gate at Bab al-Mandeb, holding the whole Yemeni coastline and declaring an embargo on Saudi shipping.

I moved off-grid partly to opt out of systems I’d stopped trusting, and I still believe that was the right call for me. But there’s no such thing as being off-grid from the shipping lanes. The solar kit arrived on a ship. The flour, the coffee, the spare parts for everything that breaks up here… all of it came through a chokepoint somebody is currently threatening. When the price of moving things around the planet goes up, it finds its way up our dirt track eventually, and it finds its way to your weekly shop rather faster.

That’s not the important reason to care, mind you. The important reason is that twelve people went to an airport and didn’t come home, and that ninety-odd people in Yemen were killed in the weeks before that by bombs nobody in Riyadh had to dodge. But if compassion isn’t enough to hold your attention, the diesel price usually is, and I’m not too proud to use both.

Departures

So where does it go from here? The coalition has promised a decisive response, which in this part of the world has a fairly consistent meaning. The Houthis frame every missile as payback for the strikes on Yemen, and they have spent ten years proving they can absorb what most governments would consider unbearable. Washington is deciding. The energy executives are landing, or not, depending on their appetite for risk and their fear of missing the next contract. Somewhere in Riyadh, a cleaning crew has already been through that terminal, because airports are designed to forget quickly.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion, and I distrust anyone who offers one this week. I can tell you that targeting a passenger terminal is indefensible. I can tell you that the grievance behind it isn’t invented, and that the dead in Sanaa deserve the same first paragraph as the dead in Riyadh. I can tell you that every party to this has already run the experiment of bombing their way to peace, and every one of them got the same result. What I can’t tell you is why they all seem so certain it’ll work this time.

The departure boards in Riyadh will be updated again tomorrow. Some flights will say delayed, some will say cancelled, and somewhere on the board, in that cheerful amber font that airports use for everything from boarding to catastrophe, a line will say on time. I’d love to know who’s on it, and whether anyone has told them what the rest of us already know.

Until Next Time