Unprecedented drone attack on Saudi oil supply brings Middle East closer to brink of war

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The Middle East moved closer towards a broad armed conflict on Monday following US accusations that Iran was behind a sophisticated multi-faceted attack on major Saudi oil facilities at the weekend.

President Donald Trump warned in a tweet late on Sunday that the US was “locked and loaded” in response to the Saturday morning attack, which took up to half of Saudi oil production off line and caused world petroleum prices to jump 20 per cent.

But he also said that the US would wait for intelligence that confirmed the “culprit” behind the attack and until Saudi Arabia, whose leadership is closely allied with the Trump administration, provided guidance.

“They say that they had nothing to do with the attack on Saudi Arabia,” Mr Trump tweeted, referring to the Iranians. “We’ll see?”

The spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said in a press conference on Monday that a preliminary investigation suggested “Iranian weapons” were used in the attack, but this was later refuted by President Hassan Rouhani who claimed it was a “reciprocal response” by “Yemeni people” to assaults on the country.

The attack on the world’s main supplier of oil rattled the world, drawing condemnation across geopolitical divisions.

“This extremely serious incident makes the chances of a regional conflict that much higher,” United Nations Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council on Monday.

The flare-up comes amid a crisis prompted by the US last year, when it withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal forged by Barack Obama and launched a campaign of maximum pressure against Iran.

Mr Trump has vowed to punish any country or entity that buys oil from Iran, crippling the country’s economy. Iran has described the US policy as “economic terrorism” and vowed to retaliate.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which are closely allied with Iran and are battling the Saudis for control of their country, have claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was launched with drones and the assistance of friendly forces inside the kingdom.

Yahya Saree, spokesperson for Yemen’s Houthi forces, warned of more attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and urged companies and foreign nationals to avoid the installations because they “could be targeted at any moment”.

But US secretary of state Mike Pompeo cast doubt on their claim of responsibility, and unnamed US officials have told Washington journalists that they suspected the attacks were launched from either Iraq or Iran using both drones and missiles.

“There’s no doubt that Iran is responsible for this,” one US official was quoted as saying by Reuters. “No matter how you slice it, there’s no escaping it. There’s no other candidate. Evidence points in no other direction than that Iran was responsible for this.”

ABC News and Fox News cited unnamed US officials as saying that Iran launched nearly a dozen cruise missiles and over 20 drones from its own territory in the attack, but provided no evidence substantiating the claim, which was doubted by some experts.

“It is highly implausible that these attacks originated from Iran,” said Ali Vaez, Iran analyst at the Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution and advocacy group.

“That would be a clear break with long-established Iranian behaviour of carrying out attacks characterised by plausible deniability.”

Late on Sunday, US vice president Mike Pence and Defence Secretary Mike Esper were seen leaving the White House after a meeting with Mr Trump about the attack on Saudi facilities, prompting speculation that the military officials were drawing up targets. The US came close to attacking Iran in June, after Iranian forces downed an expensive American drone, but Mr Trump backed off at the last moment.

Close watchers of the months-long drama unfolding in the Persian Gulf, where both Iran and its allies have been allegedly staging small attacks on oil vessels and infrastructure, were awed by the scale and severity of the attack at the Abqaiq facility operated by the Saudi oil company Aramco, which is preparing for a highly anticipated public offering set to net the kingdom billions of dollars.

“It’s a clear escalation,” said Eckart Woertz, a researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. “It’s serious. It’s not like attacks before where the effect was more symbolic. This facility is essential for all of the oil produced in Saudi Arabia. It all has to go through Abqaiq. This was quite a critical piece of infrastructure. That it was able to be hit in that way certainly leaves an impression on the markets.”

Saturday’s attack on the Abqaiq oil facility was unprecedented in its accuracy and scale. Satellite photos released by the US showed meticulously punctured oil infrastructure at the Aramco site in eastern Saudi Arabia. Independent analysts have said the attack exceeds the range and capabilities of the Houthi rebels.

But Iran has strenuously denied it was behind the attack.

“Iran has explicitly declared its support for Yemeni people and their rights, but accusing Iran of such measures is in line with maximum deceit, and is totally baseless,” foreign ministry spokesperson Abbas Mousavi said on Monday.

The US argument faces a huge credibility hurdle. It hinges its suspicion that Iran was behind the attack by pointing to the angle of the missiles fired into the facility, suggesting they came from Iran or Iraq to the north or the northwest.

But armed drones have the ability to hover above or circle a target, giving them the ability to strike from any angle. Further muddying the picture, the Houthis have insisted they used assets within Saudi Arabia to stage the attack, which was in response to continued bombing of Yemeni sites by Riyadh.

The US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis have histories of reshaping facts to fit into self-serving narratives, adding doubts to any accusation of culpability.

“The credibility of all sides involved here is rather limited,” said Mr Woertz.

Mr Woertz said it was “conceivable that the Houthis acted on their own”, as the attack plays into the group’s interests more than it helps Iran, which is seeking sanctions relief from the Trump administration. “If it is part of the Iranian escalation strategy that they’ve played so far, they might have really overplayed their hand. It’s a bit too over the top,” he said.

“It’s important not to treat the Houthis as the pliant tool of Iran. The dependency of the Houthis on Iran is not the same as Hezbollah.”

Whether Iran or the Iranian-allied Houthis were behind the attack, the timing puts pressure on the US to either defend its staunch ally and risk a major confrontation with an unpredictable adversary, or refrain and risk looking weak, fraying trust in Washington by longtime partners.

The attack also darkens already dim prospects for a meeting between Mr Trump and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly meeting this month, an encounter many European diplomats hoped would ease tensions and increase the prospect of scaling back Iran’s atomic research programme, which has been expanding since the US withdrew from the nuclear deal.

The Trump administration claimed withdrawing from the nuclear deal would pressure Iran into modifying its behaviour and come back to the table for a new deal. But if Iran was behind the attack, Mr Vaez said, “it shows that instead of moderating Iran’s behaviour, maximum pressure has pushed them to be much more aggressive because they increasingly have much less to lose”.

Mr Vaez suggested Iran may have staged the attack to send a message to the Saudis that there would be a cost for supporting Trump’s policies. In recent weeks, the United Arab Emirates appeared to step back from the confrontation with Iran it had long championed after a series of alleged Iranian attacks on ships sailing from its ports, even loosening some of the financial restrictions it had imposed.

“The Saudis didn’t get the message,” he said. “This might have been devised as a strategy to put pressure on Trump and Saudi and make them realise that the current situation is not sustainable.”

Iran and the US have been at loggerheads since the 1979 revolution that toppled the pro-US monarch. Tehran’s clerical regime has said in recent years that if the US wants a shooting war, it is prepared for it, and has repeatedly shown a willingness to escalate rather than back down. Iranian leaders have long factored in the possibility of limited US airstrikes into their calculations.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh warned that the country was ready for armed conflict with the US.

“In addition to US bases, we have all of their vessels, including ships and warships, within reach of our missiles at a distance of up to 2,000km, and we are constantly monitoring them,” he said.

“They think they will be safe if they get 400km away from us. But … as soon as a war breaks out, we will first put their vessels under fire.”