Why are the Houthis able to strike Riyadh so often?
Iran has provided the Houthis with weapons, funding and training for more than a decade, although Tehran denies arming the group in violation of a United Nations arms embargo.
Despite Iran facing its own financial and military strains due to war and sanctions, the Houthis have learned – with Iranian help – how to assemble their own weapons, including drones and missiles, experts interviewed by Reuters said.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and members of Iran’s other ally, Lebanese Hezbollah, initially gave the Houthis knowledge of missile systems and their operation, Andreas Krieg, senior security studies lecturer at King’s College London told Reuters.
“Former Yemeni military engineers and a growing generation of locally trained specialists have helped institutionalise these capabilities,” he said.
“Tehran has not simply supplied the Houthis with weapons. It has helped create an indigenous military-industrial learning process that becomes progressively harder to dismantle, even if direct Iranian supply routes are disrupted.”
This has made the Houthis one of Iran’s most cost-effective and valuable regional military allies.
The group has also reportedly turned to artificial intelligence to enhance its weapons capabilities.
Anthropic said last month that “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen” had used its Claude AI assistant to help develop software for a guided rocket, a planned ballistic missile with a range of more than 2,000km and a missile variant incorporating a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s air defences face mounting pressure from repeated missile and drone attacks, even as its US ally grapples with demands on its own air defence resources amid the war with Iran.
