Aug 9 (Reuters) - Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis said they had attacked Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery on Sunday, two days after the kingdom signed a defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan.
The Saudi energy ministry said a fire had broken out at the refinery that was later extinguished, without saying what caused the fire. It said the relevant authorities were completing procedures to deal with the incident, which processes 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day in southwestern Saudi Arabia. No injuries were reported, it added.
The Houthis targeted the refinery with a drone, military spokesperson Yahay Saree posted on X. They had struck Aramco sites before in Jazan and Yanbu on the Red Sea.
Iran and its allies of Shi’ite Muslim armed groups have been firing on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and blockading their energy shipments, since the U.S. and Israel attacked it on February 28 in a major escalation after years of regional tumult.
Aramco chief Amin Nasser said last week that recent attacks on the company’s facilities, the world’s top oil exporter, had caused some production interruptions but that he was confident operations could be restored quickly. He said the attacks had no material operational or financial impact.
The escalations, which disrupted global energy supplies and rattled the world’s economy, prompted Saudi Arabia on Friday to form an alliance with Sunni Muslim U.S. allies, Turkey and Pakistan.
The accord is intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression and stipulates that an armed attack against any of the three would be regarded as an attack on all.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said the new alliance was not directed against Iran or any other country, but rather served as a general pledge to support the three allies’ security.
On July 27, Aramco shut the refinery in Jazan, which nears the border with Yemen, after an attack by Houthi militants damaged the plant’s Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) complex and tank farm area, according to a note from consultancy IIR seen by Reuters.
The refinery also produces gasoline and ultra-light sulfur diesel.
The Houthis declared a naval blockade against the kingdom in the Red Sea last month in response to what they described as a Saudi siege of Yemen, an allegation Riyadh denies.
(Reporting by Hatem Maher, Nayera Abdallah, and Tala Ramadan; Editing by William Mallard and Lincoln Feast.)
