Dammam airport attack kills two as US orders non-essential staff out of Saudi Arabia

Dammam airport attack

Late on 21 October, an attack struck King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, in eastern Saudi Arabia. The General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) first reported one person dead and eight injured, then raised the toll to two, a Saudi national and an Indian national. The eight injured, of several nationalities, were taken to hospital, and GACA described their injuries as ranging from minor to serious. Authorities said the damage to airport facilities was still being assessed. The Houthis separately claimed a ballistic missile strike on Saudi military targets at Aden airport in Yemen the same day.

Shaybah oil field

Saudi Arabia's Energy Ministry said debris from an intercepted drone killed two people and injured two others at Shaybah, an Aramco-operated oil field in the country's southeast, on 21 October. The dead were a Nepali and a Filipino national, while the injured were Pakistani and Indian nationals. The falling debris set a contractor's vehicle on fire, the ministry said. Europa Press reported that the drone had first been intercepted by air defenses before its wreckage struck the vehicle.

US orders departures

The State Department has ordered some diplomats and family members of US government employees to leave Saudi Arabia, citing Houthi attacks on civil airports and other critical infrastructure. The order covers the embassy in Riyadh and the consulates. Spokesman Tommy Pigott said:

The safety and security of Department personnel and their families remains our highest priority.

A diplomatic source told AFP that all staff at the US embassy in Saudi Arabia and their families had been ordered out, and that families of embassy staff in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain were also being evacuated. The Riyadh embassy was severely damaged at the start of the US war against Iran and ran with skeleton staff for months, although some diplomats have since returned.

Iran tensions and Israeli exercise

Donald Trump has not ruled out a new offensive against Iran. Netanyahu said at a military ceremony in southern Israel that the Iranian regime had not learned its lesson and that the only way to remove the threat once and for all was to overthrow it, a directive he said he had given the IDF, Mossad and security agencies. According to Axios, citing Israeli and US officials, dozens of Israeli Air Force jets flew over Syria and Iraq on 19 October toward the Iranian border in what Israel called a deterrence exercise. The sortie included tankers and followed a route consistent with a possible strike on Iran before turning back, and Israel had told Washington in advance. The exercise came a week before the Israeli elections on 27 October. Some US officials suspect Israel wanted to provoke Iranian air defenses into firing, which would give it a pretext to resume attacks on Iran.

Timeline

The dated sequence runs from the Israeli exercise on 19 October to the revised Dammam toll on 22 October. An early report gave one death at Dammam, and the figure was later updated to two.

The kingdom has been hit by near-daily attacks, and Houthi strikes on civil airports were the reason cited for the US order. The Shaybah deaths came from a separate Energy Ministry statement on the same day.