A strike hit Najran, the Saudi province running along the border with Yemen, on Thursday 6 August, wounding eleven civilians. The National, citing Saudi officials, gave the breakdown as seven Saudis, one Yemeni, two Egyptians and one Pakistani, with a four-year-old suffering second-degree burns1. CNN's live blog carried the same account from a Saudi official2. No group has claimed responsibility.
The Houthis have stayed silent on it, a day after the movement claimed a strike on a Saudi tanker in the Gulf of Aden3. Thursday's strike has drawn no Houthi claim, unusual for a group that typically owns hits in this belt within hours. They were willing enough to claim the strike that set Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery alight on Friday 24 July, in the same stretch of south-western border country.
Four of the eleven are not Saudi nationals, and that detail has a history on this file. When an Iranian drone hit a residential building in Al-Kharj on Saturday 7 March, the two people it killed were an Indian and a Bangladeshi worker, and all twelve wounded were Bangladeshi. Housing for the Gulf's foreign workforce sits closest to the installations being aimed at. A drone that misses a radar or a refinery lands on people whose governments hold no seat at any table in this war, and Cairo, Islamabad, New Delhi and Dhaka collect the casualty lists anyway.
Riyadh has hit back over less than this. Drones sent at Eastern Province oil facilities and at the capital in late July were destroyed in flight and hurt nobody, and Riyadh still bombed militia positions inside Iraq at 05:00 GMT on Wednesday 29 July, acting in coordination with American forces. Those drones did no damage. This strike put eleven people in hospital, and Riyadh has published no vector, no group and no debris to aim a reply at.
