Saudi air defences shot down a drone heading for a facility at one of the kingdom's biggest oilfields, deep in the Empty Quarter desert — but the falling wreckage killed two foreign workers and injured two more outside the perimeter fence.
Saudi air defences intercepted a drone that was attempting to hit a facility at Saudi Aramco's Shaybah oilfield on Wednesday, the Saudi Energy Ministry said, in the latest attack of an escalating campaign of missile and drone strikes on the kingdom by Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis. The drone never reached its target. What fell out of the sky did the damage.
The ministry said the interception scattered debris outside the facility's perimeter, where it killed two residents — one Filipino and one Nepali — and injured two others, one Pakistani and one Indian. The falling wreckage also set a vehicle on fire outside the fence. The field itself was untouched: the ministry said the attempted attack did not affect operations at Shaybah.
"The attempted attack resulted in the deaths of two residents, one Filipino and one Nepali, and injuries to two residents, one Pakistani and one Indian due to falling debris following the interception."
Shaybah is one of the most remote major oil installations on Earth. The field sits in the Rub' al Khali — the Empty Quarter — more than 500 miles from Aramco's headquarters in Dhahran, surrounded by dunes hundreds of feet high. Aramco discovered the field in 1968 and brought it on stream in 1998; after a major expansion completed in 2016, it produces around one million barrels a day of high-value Arab Extra Light crude, with its own airport and a 645-kilometre pipeline to processing facilities further north. That remoteness has long been treated as a layer of protection. On Wednesday it was not enough to keep the war away from the men who work there.
The attack lands in the middle of the Houthis' widening offensive against Saudi Arabia. Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport has been struck multiple times this month and was shut down on October 10; it was open for domestic flights on Wednesday, though major carriers including Lufthansa and Air France have cancelled service through mid-November. The Houthis have acknowledged attacking the airport. Earlier this month, a limited fire broke out in an administrative building at an Aramco facility in the Eastern Province, and last month debris from another intercepted Houthi drone killed a Yemeni resident of the kingdom — the first civilian casualty since the Houthis stepped up their attacks on Saudi shipping and oil facilities.
The Energy Ministry's statement did not name who launched the drone. The Houthis have claimed a series of attacks on Saudi targets this week, including Aramco's facilities at Yanbu and Shaybah, though a source cited in market reports denied their claim that Monday's strikes caused fires, saying the facilities were intact. Saudi Arabia has answered the campaign with a wave of strikes on missile launcher sites, vowing to protect the kingdom, and says its defences have intercepted many ballistic missiles fired by the group. Oil markets are pricing in the risk: Brent crude climbed above $108 a barrel this week as the attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure intensified fears over supply. At Shaybah, the ministry's word was that production rolls on — a million barrels a day, even as the debris of a single intercepted drone left two workers dead outside the fence.