The Feud: Why Saudi Arabia and the Houthis Keep Going to War | Middle East Explained

In October 2026, missiles fired from Yemen hit Riyadh's main airport again and again. At least twelve people were killed, and the capital of Saudi Arabia was cut off from the sky for two weeks. The missiles were fired by the Houthis, a movement from a poor mountain corner of north Yemen that Saudi Arabia has bombed for eleven years without beating. How did it come to this? This film tells the whole story in plain words: the border war of 1934 and the lands of Asir, Najran and Jizan; the 1960s, when Saudi Arabia fought FOR the Zaydi imam of north Yemen; the million Yemeni workers sent home in 1990; the Saudi-funded school in Saada and the Zaydi revival; Hussein al-Houthi and the six wars of 2004 to 2010; the 2015 Saudi-led war, the blockade, the hunger and cholera; the 2022 truce; the Red Sea attacks; and the new war of 2026, after the Strait of Hormuz closed and Saudi oil had to sail past the Houthis through the Bab al-Mandab, the Gate of Tears. This is a live war. Facts are stated as of 25 October 2026. Casualty figures that differ between sources are given as ranges or floors, and claims by either side are attributed. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open: Riyadh, 10 October 2026 1:32 Chapter 1: Two Neighbours 4:32 Chapter 2: The Big Neighbour 7:26 Chapter 3: Six Wars in the Mountains 9:44 Chapter 4: The Storm 14:23 Chapter 5: The Gate of Tears 18:51 Epilogue: Why It Never Ends SOURCES Treaty of Taif (1934) and Treaty of Jeddah (2000) texts; British India Office records (Qatar Digital Library); MERIP; Washington Institute; Middle East Institute; Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies; IRIN; Chatham House (Farea al-Muslimi, quoted by TIME); UNDP (2021 death toll estimate); WHO (cholera); UN OCHA; Yemen Data Project via The Guardian; ICRC; Human Rights Watch; UN Panel of Experts (Abqaiq, January 2020); USNI News; Long War Journal; Al Jazeera, Reuters, AP, BBC, The Guardian, France 24, TIME and Bloomberg reporting, July to October 2026. ARCHIVE CREDITS Public domain / CC0 (17 items), including Voice of America (VOA) photographs by Almigdad Mojalli and Henry Ridgwell (5), U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Navy and NASA/ISS imagery, via Wikimedia Commons. B.alotaby, CC BY-SA 4.0 Bashar 0310, CC BY-SA 4.0 Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 Brian Harrington Spier from Shanghai, China, CC BY-SA 2.0 Dan from Brussels, Europe, CC BY-SA 2.0 Hamza Shiban, CC BY-SA 3.0 Ibrahem Qasim, CC BY-SA 4.0 Ibrahim Alqousi, CC BY-SA 4.0 Julien Harneis from Sana'a, Yemen, CC BY-SA 2.0 Kayhan ERTUGRUL, CC BY-SA 3.0 LBM1948, CC BY-SA 4.0 lelebella, CC BY 2.0 Linda Shen, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo liton islam, CC BY 3.0 Maria Gropa, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo Matt May, CC BY 2.0 mwanasimba from La Réunion, CC BY-SA 2.0 Noor Al Hassan, via Al Jazeera English., CC BY-SA 2.0 Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 Sir Mohinder Dhillon, CC BY-SA 4.0 Александра Пугачевская (Alexandra Pugachevsky), CC BY-SA 3.0 إبراهيم سالم ضيف, CC BY-SA 4.0 MAPS: our own animated maps built on Natural Earth (public domain). Zones of control are approximate (by governorate); fronts, routes and the pipeline line are schematic. MUSIC: original score generated with ACE-Step (Apache 2.0). Sound effects synthesised. NARRATION: AI voice (Google Gemini TTS). Some cinematic scenes are AI-generated reconstructions (FLUX.1 schnell, LTX-2.5) and contain no real people. They are marked as altered or synthetic content. Images marked CC BY-SA are shared under the same licence. THE IRON ARCHIVE: wars, empires, and the people caught between.