OPINION | The Houthi factor and Makkah Pact's first litmus test: Iran's asymmetric war reaches Saudi Arabia

Genesis: From local insurgency to regional lever

The Houthi movement began in the 1990s as a Zaidi Shia revivalist current in Yemen's northern highlands and hardened into an armed force through six rounds of war with the Yemeni state between 2004 and 2010. Its capture of Sanaa in September 2014 and the Saudi-led intervention that followed in 2015 produced eight years of civil war and one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. A 2022 truce froze the conflict without resolving it. Iran used the pause to deepen its investment in the Houthis as a strategic asset, an investment that paid off in October 2023 when the group began firing on Israel and on Red Sea shipping in the name of Gaza solidarity, forcing global trade to reroute and giving Tehran a lever far from its own borders.

That lever has now been pulled again, and harder. Since the United States and Israel opened their campaign against Iran on February 28, 2026, the Houthis have resumed missile attacks on Israel, moved to seize islands astride the Bab el-Mandeb, and this week extended the pressure directly onto Saudi soil.

The strike that exposed the pact

On September 10, drones launched from Iraqi territory struck Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions, forcing Riyadh to shut down the line, which carries up to seven million barrels a day and serves as its principal bypass around the blockaded Strait of Hormuz. The timing was not incidental. It came within days of Houthi forces routing Saudi-backed troops and seizing Perim and Zuqar islands in the Bab el-Mandeb, and as Saudi southern provinces absorbed missile and drone fire that Riyadh says has wounded scores of civilians.

What makes this strike significant is not just the damage but its origin. Iraq, not Yemen, was the launch point, with militias aligned with Tehran rather than the Houthis themselves launching it. This is the same signature of dispersed, deniable pressure that Iran has applied through the Houthis in the Red Sea, now extended to a second geography. The message to Riyadh is unmistakable. Saudi Arabia can be reached from multiple directions at once by proxies that leave Tehran's own hands technically clean.

This is precisely where the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, signed by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye barely five weeks earlier, faced its first real test and fell short. The pact rests on the premise that Pakistan's nuclear deterrent and Turkiye's defence industrial depth would complement Saudi capital and geography against exactly this kind of contingency. Yet when drones struck, the response was Saudi alone, a unilateral shutdown and an official condemnation, not a coordinated trilateral posture. Pakistan issued no visible signal of alliance activation. Turkiye's assets stayed out of the picture entirely. A defence pact built around symmetric, conventional aggression has little answer for asymmetric, deniable strikes launched by proxies from a third country's soil. Riyadh discovered that a treaty signed in Makkah does not translate into resilience against a drone with no clear flag.

Analysis: Asymmetric warfare by design

Iran's approach here follows a consistent logic that has defined its regional strategy for two decades. Raise costs for adversaries through networks of aligned militias and proxies rather than direct confrontation, which invites retaliation Tehran cannot afford. Squeezed by the loss of Hezbollah's deterrent capacity and by direct strikes on its own territory, Iran is widening the map rather than narrowing it, opening fronts in Yemen, Iraq, and now against Saudi infrastructure, each cheap to sustain and difficult to attribute cleanly.

The Saudi pipeline strike also serves a second, subtler purpose. It shows that closing the Strait of Hormuz is not Tehran's only card. If Riyadh's bypass route can be disabled by proxies in Iraq, the value of Gulf alternatives to Hormuz shrinks, and with it the credibility of the broader Gulf security architecture that Riyadh, Washington and now Islamabad have tried to build. This is asymmetric warfare aimed as much at psychology and alliance cohesion as at barrels of oil.

The power pact question

The Makkah Pact was conceived as a hedge against exactly this kind of moment, a demonstration that Gulf and South Asian defence architectures could reinforce each other. Its early failure to activate visibly raises a harder question about what such multilateral defence pacts are meant to deter. Conventional pacts assume a state actor and an identifiable act of aggression. Iran's use of proxies denies both. Unless Makkah's signatories build in explicit protocols for proxy and infrastructure attacks, the pact risks being a document that reassures on paper while leaving its principal beneficiary, Saudi Arabia, to absorb asymmetric costs alone. For Pakistan in particular, the episode reminds us that a defence commitment is only as credible as the response it produces when tested, and this week it produced none.

Prognosis

Three trajectories lie ahead. A negotiated de-escalation, in which Gulf mediators persuade Iran that further disruption threatens interests it still values, remains possible but unlikely while Tehran sees leverage in continued pressure. A more probable path is calibrated, continued escalation, with further intermittent strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure, sustained harassment in the Red Sea, and a grinding Yemeni civil war layered atop the wider regional one. The most dangerous trajectory is Saudi Arabia being drawn into sustained two-front exposure, in the north from Iraq-based proxies and in the south from the Houthis, at precisely the moment its energy infrastructure is under strain and its newest defence pact has yet to prove its worth.

Implications for India

For India, this is not a distant crisis. A meaningful share of India's crude imports and trade transit the waters now contested by the Houthis, and Saudi Arabia's energy stability directly affects prices at home. New Delhi must also read the Makkah Pact's stumble carefully. Pakistan's defence architecture with Riyadh looks less formidable than its signing ceremony suggested, a fact that should inform India's risk assessments along its western flank rather than offer false comfort. Equally, India's deepening ties with the UAE, a partner that has so far avoided the kind of exposure Saudi Arabia now faces, look more valuable by the week. The lesson for Indian strategic planners is that, in this phase of Middle Eastern conflict, resilience is being tested not by treaties and summits but by how partners actually respond when a drone crosses a border no one officially declared open.

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)