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Transitions on the Arab Peninsula

In spring 2025 a travel guide could call the Arabian Peninsula waking up and opening up, and it wasn't foolish. Twenty months later the airports are hit and Taiz is under siege. Perceptions of the place differ, and they change fast.

Idan Rednaxus ·
#current events#yemen#saudi arabia#uae#houthis#iran#war#geopolitics
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#strait of hormuz#kuwait#oman#arabian peninsula#transitions#interfaces#frame shift#aden#gulf of aden#arms smuggling#taiz#vision 2030#tourism#hejaz#ibn saud

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In March 2025 a travel writer, Simon Buckby, published a guide called “The Arabian Peninsula is waking up and opening up.” The whole peninsula was opening, it said, except Yemen, “still stuck in civil war.” A single tourist visa for all six Gulf states was coming imminently, and “this is the perfect moment to come.” It wasn’t a foolish thing to write that spring. Violence on the Saudi-Yemeni border had fallen since a 2022 ceasefire, Riyadh and Tehran had restored relations, and talks were going on among all parties.

Twenty months is a short time. The same peninsula is now in a descent into hell, and the people looking at it still don’t agree on what they see.

One peninsula, several readings

Musandam is the Omani tip of land that pokes into the Strait of Hormuz. On Thursday, October 29, Britain’s maritime monitoring office reported that a small boat had come up to a tanker northeast of Khasab, the region’s main town, and attached two explosive devices to the hull, causing an engine-room fire. Iran says four tankers on unauthorized routes hit mines the next day alone, and it requires its own permission for passage. The American commander in the region says the main routes are clear, and one monitor puts traffic 70 percent below prewar levels while the Treasury Secretary says that, excluding Iran, it’s nearly normal.

Kuwait City is about as far up the Gulf as a place can get. The Associated Press reports that Iranian fire damaged or destroyed structures at 26 American military sites, most of them in Kuwait. This week Kuwait summoned Iran’s ambassador over an embassy statement.

The airports at Najran, Abha, and Jizan came under Houthi attack in the first week of October. On October 10 a missile hit King Khalid International in Riyadh and killed twelve people and wounded 309. The dead were four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, and one each from the United States, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and Sudan, a fair census of who actually lives and works on the peninsula. Two terminal roofs partly collapsed. The next day the airport canceled 99.7 percent of its flights, Riyadh’s schools went remote, and Air India, IndiGo, and SriLankan were soon suspending their routes. The Houthi warning that any Saudi airport is a military target carries two exceptions, Mecca’s and Medina’s. Britain’s travel advice now leaves out Medina’s airport alone, so the one place in the kingdom a cautious traveler may still land is the Prophet’s city.

On October 24 Saudi air defenses brought down two ballistic missiles over the region, and debris fell in Wadi al-Mughammas, some twenty kilometers east of the Grand Mosque, near Arafat, and in the Al-Nuzha district of Jeddah. The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called it an attack on the holy cities. The Houthis call that a “huge lie” and say they were aiming at the refinery at Rabigh and the port of Yanbu beyond. Where debris falls can’t settle which is true.

The unified visa, imminent in 2025, has slid to a loosely stated late 2026, and I can find no one who has announced it. On October 21 the State Department ordered its non-emergency staff out of Saudi Arabia.

And not everyone has left. Dubai’s airport lost 31 percent of its passengers in the first half of this year, and more than 60,000 residents left the city in March when it came under heavy attack, yet by July official figures had its population at 4.73 million, above where it stood before the war. “It’s better to stay in Dubai,” a Filipino mall worker named Darly Lanzuela told a reporter in August. A Syrian woman there put the same fact differently: “I stayed because I had no other option.”

Except Yemen

The two words in that spring’s account that matter now are “except Yemen.” A country of some forty million people was stepped around on the way to the resorts, in good faith, since that’s where the roads stopped.

That exception is where the opening met everything it had agreed to leave out. The chain since then has many links, and Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula traced them in September: the Saudi-Emirati rupture over southern Yemen last winter, the American and Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, a Hormuz effectively closed, a Houthi maritime embargo on the kingdom from July, a coast that fell in one September night, and the Dawn of Yemen offensive that a Saudi-backed government launched on October 4. No one of those made the next inevitable. Each of them moved a line that had looked like a fixed edge of the map.

Inside that exception today is Taiz. The city has been largely cut off since October 3. The governor says it’s encircled on all four sides and has lost some three million liters of water from wells now in Houthi hands. One hospital has cut its working incubators from forty to ten for want of fuel. The UN counts more than 281,000 people displaced since August, over half of them in the governorate, up by twenty thousand in under a week, and more than 800,000 are beyond the reach of food aid. Most of the front-line claims come from the parties themselves, and both report killing the other in great quantity. A Red Cross spokesman says that “the healthcare system across Yemen is at a breaking point,” without qualification, on either side of the line.

The siege is also about what lies beyond the city. Taiz sits on the main road south to Aden, seat of the Saudi-backed government and the great harbor on the Gulf of Aden, and the Houthis have blown the culverts on that road at Hayjat al-Abd and dug in across the line into Lahj. In one night in September they took the western coast and Bab al-Mandab, a loss the government partly disputes, and this month the Giants Brigades report throwing back a large assault in the Kahbub mountains, west of Lahj. I read the prize as Aden and with it the Gulf of Aden, sea lanes the movement could call its own. I’ve found no Houthi statement saying so, and their reported aim on the road is narrower, to split the government’s Taiz forces from their base.

Sea lanes are how this war gets fed. Seizures and crew accounts point primarily to Iran, by dhow, and dhows were still leaving Iranian ports in March, with Iran itself under attack. Other supply comes by other roads: front companies shipping through Djibouti, Somalia as a waypoint, a run from Port Sudan to Salif, and newer networks reported along the African coast through al-Shabaab and Sudanese forces. Much of it has ended at Hodeidah and Salif on the Red Sea, where the coalition now hunts it. “We strike them on land … we sink them at sea,” its spokesman said in mid-October, and its command has named the boat types it warned against: za’ima, huri, jalbah, sanbuq. On the southern coast, Shabwa’s authorities announced a seizure of their own in late October. Holding Aden would give the movement a harbor on the open ocean, and both shores of the strait.

A transition with one frame

Interfaces argued that for an institution to be transitional it has to be aware of the frame it comes from and equally of the frame it’s going to. Vision 2030 set out to be a transition in that full sense. The guide’s phrase for it was “a state-sponsored Islamic reformation,” and the first two words carry the weight. It was issued, with the religious police dismissed by the same hand that was cracking down on critics and rivals.

It knew exactly where it was coming from, which was a kingdom running out of time on oil. It knew where it was going, too, down to the renderings. What it took as given was the frame around both, a sky full of airliners, a sea open to shipping, and foreign capital and foreign workers arriving because arrival was easy. Tourism on this scale depends on those things completely. Airports turned out to be among the softest things the kingdom owned, and the Houthi formula, as their outlets give it, is “airport for airport, blockade for blockade.”

Not all of the retreat is the war’s doing. Saudi Arabia was already scaling back Neom under budget pressure, and it dropped the 2029 Asian Winter Games in January, before the war on Iran began. The Wall Street Journal, as relayed by a hostile outlet, has the Finance Ministry expecting the economy to shrink 3.6 percent this year, foreign investment falling, and air defense batteries moving to palaces and energy sites. The Future Investment Initiative, the “Davos in the Desert” due October 26 to 29, has been put off to 2027. Expo 2030 and the 2034 World Cup still have to be paid for. On October 29 AFP’s correspondents heard at least eight explosions over Riyadh. On October 30, in Atlanta, the Saudi foreign minister signed an agreement with Marco Rubio on Expo 2030.

That sequence could be read as denial. I read it as what a transition looks like when it has only one frame available. Nobody in that system has a plan for what the reforms are, if they aren’t the way to a tourist economy. Saudi women argued for theirs as rights for decades. In May 2018, weeks before the driving ban was lifted, the state arrested Loujain al-Hathloul and other women who had campaigned against it. The concession then came as part of the same package as the Soundstorm rave in the desert outside Riyadh, and a thing given as a means can go when the end does. It may not. But the kingdom has no elected assembly, independent court, or free press where anyone could say that it mustn’t, and that’s the difference between an opening and an institution.

The last time the coast changed hands

The peninsula has been through a frame shift of this size before, and the kingdom’s own founding is the record of it. In late 1923 Britain stopped paying its Arabian clients, £60,000 a year to Ibn Saud of Nejd and £25,000 a month in gold to Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz. Hussein ruled the coast and the holy cities, and he’d used that gold to buy the loyalty of the Bedouin. Ibn Saud had never needed it as much. Within a year Hussein had proclaimed himself caliph to almost general rejection, Taif and Mecca had fallen with little fighting, and an Islamic conference in Riyadh had accepted the new master of Mecca. Jeddah held out through 1925 under blockade, its merchants paying for a makeshift army that dissolved, and it opened by negotiation, through the British consul, once everything around it had gone. Saudi forces walked in on January 8, 1926. Britain had refused Hussein’s appeals for help, and so had his son Abdullah in Transjordan.

Al Balad, the old quarter of Jeddah, is what those merchants left behind. A century on, their conquerors’ heirs hold the richer coast, on a pipeline to Yanbu that was struck in September, and they’re the ones calling for help. Washington declined a Saudi request for air strikes in September and has since supplied intelligence and targeting help. Turkey and Pakistan signed the Makkah defense pact and agreed to send forces to the kingdom, and on October 26 Saudi Arabia’s defense minister went with their envoys to Tehran, on what Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group called an “11th-hour visit.” Egypt’s parliament the same day, after three secret sessions and two postponements, authorized President al-Sisi to help defend the kingdom if it asks, which would be Egypt’s first large deployment abroad since 1991. No request has been announced.

None of that says the same thing will happen, and Riyadh isn’t Jeddah. On this peninsula, though, a rich coast and a paid-for loyalty have failed together before.

From outside the plan

Iran’s new Supreme Leader, unseen in public since he succeeded in March, allegedly told his commanders on Saturday that any threat must be met with “an immediate, impactful, and geographically unrestricted response.” The White House has said it won’t strike before Tuesday’s midterm elections, and Rubio won’t say about afterward. The whole peninsula falls inside that last phrase.

One small item in the week’s reports came from elsewhere. In Geneva, tribal leaders from areas held by both sides in Yemen launched a Code of Honour for the Protection of Civilians, signed so far by about five thousand. I don’t know whether it will save anybody in Taiz, and it has no enforcement behind it. A ministry didn’t issue it, though, and it doesn’t depend on anyone’s flight schedule.

Sources

A note on how this piece was written: the pairing of these two views and the war briefs it draws on are mine. The sentences, and the reading of one view against the other, were drafted by an AI model from that direction, then edited by hand. I’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.