Riyadh Under Fire: The Major Escalation the Media Is Ignoring | Episode 27
John Kiriakou

207,200 views Premiered 17 hours ago John Kiriakou’s Briefing Room

The war between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis has escalated dramatically as Riyadh’s international airport was hit by missile strikes twice in forty-eight hours, leaving at least twelve dead and hundreds injured. As Saudi forces strike back hard with widespread bombings across Yemen, we analyze the silence from American media, break down how the White House might react, and look at whether this major escalation will pull the United States directly into a wider Middle Eastern war. We also react to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping order to investigate and prosecute IDF soldiers who blew the whistle on military conduct in the anonymous "NAZA" investigative documentary.
On the domestic front, we debunk the right-wing influencer hoax claiming Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was secretly institutionalized in Ohio, exposing the real political panic driving these campaign-trail conspiracy theories. We then go inside the West Bank to look at a remarkable 60 Minutes package detailing weaponized settler violence and the detention of Palestinian residents. Finally, after years of persistence on the show, we celebrate a major milestone as we have officially made contact with Angry Birds headquarters, before tackling the uncharted legal territory of two botched high-profile military executions.

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West condemns Houthis but stays silent on Saudi strikes – former British diplomat (VIDEO)

Leaders denouncing attacks on Saudi airports ignored the bombings of Sana’a, Craig Murray has told Rick Sanchez

Western governments have shown blatant bias in favor of Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Yemen’s Houthi movement, partly because Riyadh spends billions of dollars on Western weapons, former British diplomat Craig Murray has argued.

Murray discussed the prolonged conflict and its ties to the arms industry with RT’s Rick Sanchez in the latest episode of ‘Sanchez Effect’. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan argued that the conflict in Yemen has deep roots in British colonial policies.

Sanchez pointed to the vast sums Riyadh has spent on weapons from Britain, France and other Western countries during its campaign against the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah.

“They may have all the weaponry and all the money but they have no belief in their own cause,” Murray responded.

“In the last 12 years since Ansar Allah controlled the airport in Sana’a I found 27 different times the Saudis have bombed Sana’a airport,” Murray added, “and not on one of those 27 times did the European Union condemn the Saudis.”

The former diplomat contrasted the lack of Western criticism of Saudi strikes with the swift condemnation of recent Houthi attacks on airports in Saudi Arabia.

Murray and Sanchez also discussed how Western audiences have historically been conditioned to regard people in other parts of the world as dishonest or uncivilized, and the media’s role in shaping those perceptions.

The former ambassador expressed hope that younger generations, unlike many of their parents, are increasingly unwilling to accept media narratives without questioning them.

Watch the exchange or tune in to ‘Sanchez Effect’ for the full episode.

https://rt-english.com/news/647127-sanchez-murrey-saudi-yemen/

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The Pipeline That Was Supposed to Save Saudi Arabia

by Larry C. Johnson

When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, Saudi Arabia had what almost no other Gulf producer had: a way out at scale. The East-West pipeline, known in the industry as Petroline, carries crude 1,200 kilometers across the desert from the oil fields of the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Its maximum capacity is about 7 million barrels a day. For seven months it has been the reason the world could still count on Saudi oil. That lifeline is now failing.

How the system works

Karl Miller has just mapped the network, and his work makes clear why the pipeline is so vulnerable. Oil does not simply flow from a well into a pipe. It is lifted from wells across the great fields, Ghawar, Khurais, Shaybah and the rest, and sent through gathering lines to gas-oil separation plants, where oil, gas and water are separated. It then moves to Abqaiq, the stabilization hub at the center of the system, which has 18 crude stabilization units. Only then does it enter the East-West corridor.

The pipeline itself depends on 11 mainline pumping stations that push the crude across the country, plus two separate pressure-relief stations that protect the line but add no pumping power. At Yanbu the crude goes into storage, to refineries and onto tankers. Every link has to work. As Miller puts it, a pipeline is a connected system of pressure, power and controls, and Yanbu can stop loading without a single bomb hitting the port if the crude stops arriving.

Four stations down

That is what is now happening. I can confirm that four of the pipeline’s thirteen stations are out of service. A drone strike on September 11 knocked the line largely out of action for weeks; Riyadh blamed Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. Repairs had only partly restored flows when, on October 4, a strike hit the pumping station at Khurais, east of Riyadh, for the first time, and the line stopped again. No one has claimed that attack.

Miller cautions that you cannot simply divide stations into capacity: losing a third of the stations does not mean losing exactly a third of the flow. What matters is where the damaged stations sit, what bypasses exist, and how much pressure the remaining pumps can sustain. But a pipeline that has lost several of its pumping stations cannot run anywhere near its rated capacity, and the replacement pumps, turbines and transformers are custom-built equipment with long lead times. Using a throughput benchmark of 5.8 million barrels a day, Miller calculates that a complete interruption of the corridor would put 40.6 million barrels of crude movement at risk in a week and 174 million in a month.

The pipeline is under pressure at both ends. On the Red Sea side, Ansar Allah has seized islands at the mouth of the Red Sea, including Perim inside the Bab al-Mandab, and in July declared a “maritime ban” on Saudi shipping. Product tankers leaving Yanbu and Rabigh for Asia and East Africa now have to turn north through Suez, adding nearly a month to their voyages. So even the barrels that reach Yanbu are slower and costlier to sell.

What Iran did

The damage to the wider Saudi system has come in two separate campaigns, and it is worth keeping them distinct. Iran’s strikes came in the first weeks of the war, in March and April, and hit the Gulf coast and the export outlets. The 550,000-barrel-a-day Ras Tanura refinery was shut for about a week. Yanbu’s loadings were briefly halted, and a drone came down at the SAMREF refinery in Yanbu. In April the 460,000-barrel-a-day SATORP refinery and petrochemical complex at Jubail halted units, the Riyadh refinery was hit, fires at the Ju’aymah gas plant disrupted LPG and natural gas liquids exports, and production capacity was cut by about 300,000 barrels a day at each of Manifa and Khurais. Shaybah was targeted repeatedly. Public reporting did not always name the attacker for every spring strike, but they came during Iran’s campaign and followed its pattern: the coast, the processing hubs, the exits.

What Ansar Allah has done

Ansar Allah’s campaign began later, has lasted longer and keeps moving north. In August it struck Aramco’s Jizan refinery, which caught fire on August 9, and claimed an attack in Najran. On September 7 and 8 it hit Aramco sites in Jizan, Najran and Abha, halting operations and wounding 73 people. On October 3 it claimed a strike on an Aramco facility south of Riyadh. Then on October 10 it struck Ghawar, the largest conventional oil field in the world. I have independently confirmed that Ghawar was hit. Riyadh has said nothing about damage. A movement that began this war firing at targets near the Yemeni border has now reached the source of the oil that feeds the pipeline, more than 1,000 kilometers away.

Put the two campaigns together and the picture is stark. Iran damaged the Gulf coast refineries and processing plants; Ansar Allah is attacking the fields in the interior and controls the sea lane at the far end of the corridor; and the pipeline in between has lost four of its thirteen stations. Saudi Arabia is losing its Gulf exit, its Red Sea exit and the line that connects them.

The economic damage

The cost is already showing. In the second quarter Saudi oil activity fell 24.7% from a year earlier and the economy shrank 4.8%, its worst quarter since the pandemic. Oil exports were worth about $212 billion in 2025, roughly 17% of GDP, and oil revenue pays for the Saudi state and much of what is counted as the non-oil economy.

READ MORE: https://sonar21.com/the-pipeline-that-was-supposed-to-save-saudi-arabia/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

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         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….