Image depicts a destroyed Saudi pipeline pumping station.
My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
If last week has had a geopolitical main character, it was Ansarallah in Yemen. In under 24 hours, they managed to seize a very large amount of territory to their west from Saudi-backed mercenary groups. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers fled, thousands more were captured, and hundreds of combat vehicles and all sorts of military equipment and ammunition are now in Ansarallah's hands. The entire Red Sea coast of Yemen is now under their control, as well as some of the islands in and around the Bab el-Mandab, which is the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which then goes on to connect to the Arabian Sea.
While Ansarallah had a pretty good grip on the Red Sea beforehand and could blockade it to the extent that traffic through the Red Sea plummeted in 2024 and 2025 and remain subdued to this day, it is now capable of much more direct control. And the strait is considerably narrower than Hormuz, meaning there is little hope for any covert operations like those of which the US regularly tries and fails to do over there. The only alternatives for the enemies of Ansarallah both now and in the future are the route all the way around Africa, which becomes even less attractive than usual as fuel prices rise into daily record highs, or the newly inaugurated Northern Sea Route under the firm control of Russia.
While Ansarallah is likely to continue their territorial acquisitions to an extent - with Marib looking like an obvious target - how things will continue from this point seems likely to be increasingly diplomatic. Yemen was once divided between North Yemen (which is, really, western Yemen) and South Yemen (which is, really, eastern Yemen), and this division reflects several genuine historical differences between the populations. Ansarallah has repeatedly stated that they have no intention to militarily occupy the south, and indeed, they ended this most recent offensive at approximately the historical border. Nonetheless, the government in once-South Yemen's capital of Aden is considered the sole internationally recognized government of Yemen, which doesn't sound sustainable for the future, so we'll just have to see how the situation develops geopolitically from here, even if it's unlikely to be militarily in the case of the southern and eastern territories.
While all this has been going on, Ansarallah was additionally applying major pressure on Saudi Arabia itself, by bombing their military airfields and, even more critically, their oil transportation and production facilities. These strikes were mostly limited to the port facilities in e.g. Yanbu and Jazan, and the Western air interceptor famine has meant that these strikes were mostly unopposed and caused substantial losses. However, Ansarallah has now destroyed some pumping stations for the East-West pipeline that spans Saudi Arabia, bypassing Hormuz for some (but not all) of Saudi Arabia's oil production to the tune of around 4 million barrels per day, which is, in a happy numerical coincidence, about 4% of pre-2026 oil production. I've seen several wildly varying estimates for how long it might take to repair the stations, with some saying a few days and others stating at least a month; the damage does look pretty gnarly on the images. Of course, it might not really matter, because Ansarallah can easily just fire another missile at a station once it's repaired, unless and until the Saudis give in to Ansarallah's demands and end the war.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
The DF-15 series of ballistic missiles are single stage ballistic missiles with a warhead that separates from the booster stage, with a range of 700-900km depending on the variant. The DF-15B is the most useful of them all, with it's MaRV, visually similar in appearance to the Pershing II MaRV, allowing for high accuracy in theory, and an ability to complicate ballistic missile defence (although modern ballistic missile defence systems are tested against MaRVs). As for a similar Iranian system in range and payload, the Zulfiqar and Dezful missiles would be comparable. Israel has the Air LORA air launched ballistic missile with a longer range than the ground launched LORA, and the USA the PrSM, though the PrSM is brand new, no stockpile, and uses a different kind of warhead, tungsten rain of sorts vs a more conventional blast fragmentation warhead. The DF-21 can be considered a two stage DF-15B if you want, with a substantial range increase. There are also air launched and anti ship variants of the DF-21. The Iranian Kheibar Shekan series of ballistic missiles are roughly comparable in range, and Iran recently unveiled an anti ship variant of it. The USA had the nuclear armed Pershing II, which is actually very similar in external appearance to the DF-21, but retried them all at the end of the cold war.
that seems to contradict observed performance do we know how many the sauds have?
No idea how many the Saudis have, or even if they have MaRV equipped variants of the missiles.
The MaRVs are significantly harder to shoot down, but they can be intercepted. Ideally you'd want to shoot it before it starts maneuvering with a higher altitude/tier system like SM-3, Arrow 3 or THAAD, but that's not always possible (especially given ammunition shortages of these higher altitude systems, we were not in that territory previously, but we are there now). The latest lower altitude/terminal intercept systems such as SM-6 and PAC-3 CRI and MSE are still tested against MaRVs, but without the higher altitude systems to thin the herd of missiles incoming, can be overwhelmed more easily, and you have to hit a high speed maneuvering target.
For instance in the lastest missile barrage, Iran launched over 35-40 ballistic missiles of various types in a sophisticated multi layered attack (MaRV equipped, high altitude cluster munitions, non MaRV equipped) at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, with only PATRIOT appearing to engage, no higher altitude support. Even with a 90% intercept rate, that's 4 missiles leaking through and 80 interceptors fired at a rate of 2 interceptors per incoming missile... If those four missiles are accurate, and Iranian missiles appear to be significantly more accurate at longer ranges now, that's significant damage. Apparently 1x A-10C destroyed and 8x F-15Es sustaining shrapnel damage, just from the handful of missiles that got through of the 35-40 fired.
A full 2:30 video of that Iranian barrage vs interceptors
You can see the different types of trajectories the different kinds of Iranian missiles take, plus interceptions and missiles getting through. Missiles maneuvering, the interceptors responding to the maneuvers.
This is test footage of PATRIOT PAC-3 vs a Pershing-II target. This video really showcases just how much maneuvering goes on to intercept a MaRV, even in testing.