The timing could hardly have been starker. On Wednesday afternoon Washington ordered everyone at its Saudi posts without an essential job, plus relatives, to get out of the country. Within hours a strike landed on Dammam’s King Fahd airport, the main air hub of the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province.
According to the kingdom’s aviation regulator GACA, one Saudi and one Indian expatriate lost their lives and eight others were wounded. The wounded, some critically, include workers from India, Yemen, Bangladesh and Nepal. By Thursday the authority said flights were operating normally again. Earlier the same day, air defences had brought down a drone heading for a facility at Aramco’s Shaybah field near the Emirati border, and the energy ministry said two people were killed as a result.
This is not an isolated hit. The capital’s own airport has come under fire repeatedly in October, and twelve people died there on the 10th alone. The violence spills over from Yemen, where the Iran-aligned Houthi movement is once more at war with a government that Riyadh supports.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott stressed that the order covered staff “in Saudi Arabia only” and blamed the Houthis for strikes on civilian airports. Yet, speaking to Reuters, four American officials said relatives of diplomats elsewhere on the Gulf would be pulled out too. Washington had only recently sent some personnel back after the region was emptied earlier in the year.
Other governments are choosing a different signal. France’s president Emmanuel Macron, for one, landed in Riyadh to show solidarity in talks with the crown prince. Egypt’s leader, Sisi, drew a careful line: any Egyptian military role would be about guarding Saudi territory, not about striking Yemen.
For the millions of foreign workers who keep the Saudi economy running, the message of the week is uncomfortable. India’s embassy said it was in touch with the families of its nationals caught up in the Dammam attack and was still collecting details.
