Saudi state oil company Aramco has told staff to evacuate its headquarters in Dhahran on the Gulf, sources said on Thursday, as fighting between the world’s largest crude exporter and Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis intensifies.
Six people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters of the evacuation instruction. Two sources told AFP that essential workers at the headquarters, in the east of the country, were told to leave on Thursday, after their non-essential colleagues had been told to work from home since last week. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what would be its first evacuation since the start of the Iran war. The reason for the evacuation was unclear.
The instruction follows a wave of Houthi attacks on the kingdom, targeting the company and Saudi airports. The Houthis caused extensive damage to Aramco’s headquarters earlier this month when they struck the building, with fire spreading across several floors.
The kingdom’s benchmark index, .TASI, dropped 2.5% on Thursday following the Aramco news, according to LSEG data. Oil prices rose to their highest since May on concern over an escalation of the Middle East conflict and its impact on crude supplies from the key exporting region. Brent crude futures climbed $3.06, or 2.81%, to $111.88 a barrel by 1104 GMT. They hit $112.55 earlier in the session, the highest since May 18.
Clashes between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition that backs Yemen’s internationally recognised government have raged since the group pushed towards Bab el-Mandeb, a shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Red Sea. The renewed fighting in recent weeks ended a 2022 UN-brokered truce that had largely halted cross-border attacks, and opened another front in the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Houthis claim new strikes, airport attack kills two
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a televised speech on Thursday that the group had launched attacks on Aramco facilities in the Red Sea city of Yanbu, on the Saudi defence ministry in Riyadh and on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. Saudi authorities did not confirm the attacks on Yanbu and Riyadh. The Saudi-led coalition said it had intercepted drones over Riyadh and over Medina, which is near Yanbu.
The Dammam airport attack on Wednesday evening killed two people, a Saudi citizen and an Indian national, and wounded eight others, according to Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation. It said operations had resumed on Thursday and air traffic had returned to normal. Officials reported material damage to the airport, and flight-tracking service Flightradar24 said flights had been diverted away from it.
Separately, the Saudi energy ministry said falling debris from the interception of a drone targeting an oil facility in the south-east killed two people and injured two others.
The Houthis had warned airlines this month against using Saudi airspace and have repeatedly targeted Saudi airports, including Riyadh’s international airport and the southern airport of Abha. A strike on the Riyadh airport was described as the kingdom’s deadliest in years.
Saudi Arabia has responded with a wave of strikes on missile launcher sites, vowing to protect the kingdom, and says it has intercepted many ballistic missiles fired by the group. Saree said Saudi attacks on Yemen have killed and wounded 562 people since mid-July, when the Houthis imposed a naval blockade on the kingdom, which drew a warning from the coalition that it would respond “firmly”.
Saree also said on Thursday that the group was rescuing a boat carrying 14 Indians that was attacked off Jabal Zuqar island near the strait, one of the territories the group seized in an advance in September. He blamed Saudi Arabia for the attack. Saudi authorities did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
US orders departures from Saudi Arabia
The US State Department has ordered some diplomats and the families of US government employees to leave Saudi Arabia, citing attacks by the Iranian-supported Houthis on “civilian airports and other critical infrastructure”.
“The safety and security of department personnel and their families remain our highest priority,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said. The order covers the US embassy in Riyadh and its satellite consulates. The embassy was badly damaged at the start of the US war on Iran and had operated with a skeleton staff for months, although some diplomats had returned in recent weeks.
NBC and AFP reported that families of US embassy personnel were also being withdrawn from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain. In a statement on Wednesday, Pigott described those reports as “inaccurate” and said the order applied only to staff and families in Saudi Arabia.
The US previously ordered non-essential staff to leave the Gulf in late February, before the start of its war against Iran. NBC reported that the US military had been quietly scaling back its presence at bases across the Middle East in recent days. A US Central Command spokesperson told the outlet that service members were regularly moved to “optimize mission readiness”.
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was developing plans to restart the war on Iran. It said the US and Israel had drawn up plans for a “short but intensive operation” after Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth travelled to Israel this week for meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The withdrawals coincide with reports that Trump has been presented with plans for restarting strikes on Iran after the midterm elections.
Last week, Trump said the US was hoping to knock out Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a site linked to the country’s nuclear programme. The US president has publicly said he does not intend to restart the war before the 3 November elections.
