Houthis Strike Yemen Army Camps, Kill 30 Soldiers

Houthi forces hit camps belonging to Yemen’s internationally recognized government with ballistic missiles and drones on Thursday, August 6, striking positions in the provinces of Marib and Hadramaut. Government officials said at least 30 soldiers were killed. For Serbia, the ground assault is not the distant news it looks like on a map: the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Suez Canal are the route goods from Asia use to reach European ports and, from there, Serbian importers, and the Houthis have been attacking ships linked to Saudi Arabia along that same corridor since late July.

Yemeni military sources said eight rockets were launched from Al-Jawf province, north of Marib. The targets were positions at Al-Tiniya and Al-Abr in Hadramaut and Al-Ruk in Marib. The strike landed around 2 p.m. local time, in the middle of the day.

According to Al Jazeera’s Yemen editor Ahmed al-Shalafi, the camps hit belonged to several government formations: the Homeland Shield forces, the Emergency Response Forces and the First Military Region in Hadramaut. The Houthis themselves described their targets differently. Their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, claimed the strikes hit the First and Third Emergency Response Divisions, formations backed by Saudi Arabia.

The discrepancy in names is not just terminology. The Homeland Shield forces were formed in 2022 with Saudi backing, number in the tens of thousands and guard the line running through Marib, Hadramaut and the Saudi border. The Emergency Response Forces were established by presidential decree in late 2025, operate under the oversight of the Riyadh-led coalition, and hold ground along the borders and the anti-Houthi front lines in Al-Jawf and Hadramaut. Together they form the core of the Saudi military build-up in eastern Yemen.

Why the death toll is so high

Command of the First Emergency Response Division explained that casualties were heavy because soldiers had gathered for training that morning. Yemeni officials cite at least 30 dead, while the number of wounded varies by source, ranging from at least 15 to at least 50, with expectations that it will rise. Yemen’s army publicly confirmed there were dead and wounded but did not release a figure.

Saree claimed that hundreds of government troops were killed or wounded and that camps, warehouses, vehicles and weapons were destroyed. That figure has not been independently confirmed and remains a Houthi claim. He later addressed a message to government forces:

We advise the deceived and misled among our people to leave the camps of the Saudi enemy and return to their homes before it is too late.

The Houthis cited the concentration of Saudi-backed forces in eastern Yemen and the Saudi blockade of their ports and airports in Sanaa as the reason for the operation. From the other camp, the message was the opposite. Abdul Malik al-Mekhlafi, deputy head of Yemen’s Consultation and Reconciliation Authority, said the Houthis are striking government positions because the pressure on them is mounting.

This is their real project: prolonging the war and preventing the rebuilding of the state.

What snapped a chain reaction dating back to April 2022

This is the worst escalation since the de facto truce of April 2022, when large-scale fighting between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition stopped. The chain of events that led to Thursday can be traced back a month, step by step.

• In mid-July, the Houthis said an Iranian aircraft had been denied permission to land at Sanaa airport.
• On July 13, the Yemeni government announced its forces had struck that airport to prevent another Iranian aircraft from landing.
• The Houthis responded by attacking Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport, which Riyadh said it intercepted.
• On July 20, the Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and began attacking ships linked to the kingdom.
• The Saudi-led coalition retaliated with airstrikes on alleged Houthi sites in western Yemen, the first such strikes since 2022.

That wave included a battle south of the port of Hodeidah last month, when Yemeni state minister Waleed al-Qadimi said at least 15 government troops were killed along with more than 50 Houthi fighters. The comparison is telling: what was described a month ago as the fiercest clash in years has now been surpassed in a single afternoon.

The fighting did not stay inside Yemeni territory. The coalition said an attack on the Saudi border town of Najran wounded 11 civilians, including a woman and a child. Coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki framed the statement in legal terms:

These are terrorist attacks that constitute a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

The United States embassy in Yemen expressed condolences to the families of the fallen soldiers and called the attacks cowardly, describing them as yet another instance of terrorism against the Yemeni people. The Houthis did not immediately claim the attack on Najran.

How this ripples onto European routes

On the same day rockets fell on Marib, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense announced that Major General Abdullah al-Shehri had been appointed to command a new international maritime alliance for protecting the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb. The two moves, matched by date, describe the same picture from two angles: one side is intensifying fire on land, the other is institutionalizing the defense of the shipping lane.

For European and Serbian importers, what matters is the combined effect, not a single incident. While the region’s southern exit is under Houthi pressure, the Strait of Hormuz on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula is effectively closed because of the war the United States and Israel are waging against Iran. Two main outlets for oil and goods are constrained at the same time, and in Europe that is measured not in statements but in freight prices and delivery times.

Baraa Shiban, an analyst at the Royal Institute for Defence Studies, described the Houthi calculation as a gradual, sustained escalation on multiple fronts aimed at making the fragile truce unsustainable. In his assessment, this is a major risk for the Houthis themselves, but it could serve Iranian interests by raising regional pressure on the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Yemen’s war in its current form has been running since 2014, when the Houthis seized Sanaa and forced the internationally recognized government into exile. The Saudi-led coalition intervened a year later and has not managed to defeat them militarily since. What Thursday changed is not the balance of power but the threshold: after four years of relative calm, camps on land are once again a legitimate target for both sides, and the first test of how far this goes will be the conduct of the new maritime command in the Red Sea.