The US state department has ordered some diplomats and the families of US government employees to leave Saudi Arabia, as the gulf kingdom faces a barrage of near-daily attacks, with at least three people killed at an airport and oilfield on Wednesday evening.
Attacks on “civilian airports and other critical infrastructure” by the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen were highlighted as the reason for the drawdown. State department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said: “The safety and security of department personnel and their families remain our highest priority.”
The state department said the order covered its embassy in Riyadh and its satellite consulates. The embassy had been badly damaged at the start of the US war on Iran and had been operating with only a skeleton staff for months, although in recent weeks some diplomats had returned.
The announcement comes as some media – including NBC and AFP – reported that families of US embassy personnel were also being withdrawn from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain, while the New York Times said the Trump administration was developing plans to restart the war on Iran.
However in his statement on Wednesday, Pigott described the reports of further withdrawals as “inaccurate” and stressed that the state department order was for the departure of staff and their families from Saudi Arabia only.
Saudi Arabia has faced a succession of deadly attacks from the Houthis over recent weeks, including a strike on Riyadh’s international airport that was the kingdom’s deadliest in years, as the war with the group escalates.
On Wednesday evening the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority announced that one Saudi resident was killed in attacks on King Fahad international airport in Dammam, on the Gulf near Bahrain and Qatar.
Eight people were injured and the airport also suffered some material damage, according to officials. Global flight-tracking service Flightradar۲۴ said flights had been diverted away from the airport.
Separately, falling debris from the successful interception of a drone targeting an oil facility in the country’s south-east also killed two people and injured a further two, the Saudi energy ministry said.
Neither attack was immediately claimed by the Houthis, but airports and oil facilities have been a major target of the militant group in their recent wave of missile and projectile strikes on Saudi Arabia.
The US previously ordered non-essential staff to leave the Gulf ahead of the start of its war against Iran in late February. NBC reported that the US military has been quietly scaling back its presence at bases across the Middle East in recent days, however a spokesperson from US central command told the US outlet that service members are regularly moved to “optimize mission readiness”.
The withdrawal of staff from the region comes amid reports that Trump has been presented with plans for restarting strikes on Iran, after the midterm elections.
The New York Times reported that the US and Israel developed plans for a “short but intensive operation”, after defense secretary Peter Hegseth travelled to Israel earlier this week for meetings with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Last week Trump said the US was looking to knock out Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a site linked to the country’s nuclear program, however the president has publicly said that he does not intend to restart the war before the ۳ November elections.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
