JUST weeks after its formation, the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement faces its first challenge: the escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi militia.

The rebel group has struck Saudi air bases and key oil facilities with missiles and drones, while the kingdom has intensified air strikes on Houthi-held areas in Yemen.

The Houthis have also targeted Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.

The escalation began in mid-July, when the Houthis formally declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia and began hitting Saudi-flagged shipping, after Yemeni government forces attacked a flight from Iran at Sana’a airport.

The Houthis have been fighting Yemen’s internationally recognised government since 2014.

The violence subsided after the warring sides reached an internationally brokered ceasefire in 2022, but flared up again after the July incident when the militia broke the truce, declared a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea and began attacking Saudi vessels.

Its ultimate aim is to drive Saudi Arabia out of Yemen and take full control of the territory.

This latest escalation has widened the conflict in West Asia, even as America’s war with Iran grinds on with no end in sight.

With the fighting now threatening Saudi Arabia directly, will the kingdom invoke the alliance’s mutual defence clause — the one that treats an attack on one member as an attack on all members? The danger of a wider conflagration engulfing the entire region carries serious implications for the rest of the world.

The Houthis, who already hold much of Yemen, have seized a strategic island in a lightning offensive against government forces, giving them complete control of Bab al-Mandeb — the key marine chokepoint through which 12 per cent of the world’s trade passes.

They now control 90 per cent of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline.

The Houthi leadership says it is not seeking to block all commercial shipping in the Red Sea, only Saudi-linked vessels.

But the heightening tension is likely to keep other ships away.

With the Strait of Hormuz virtually blocked, the situation is explosive.

Global energy markets, already reeling from the six-month conflict between US-Israel and Iran, are bracing for further shock.

Saudi Arabia, which had stayed out of the Iran war, now risks being drawn into a wider conflict.

These actions by a militia widely seen as aligned with Iran have opened a new front in the conflict.

They have coincided with a drone attack, apparently launched from Iraq by allegedly another Iran-linked militia, that forced temporary closure of the East-West oil pipeline crossing Saudi Arabia.

Together, the attacks have disrupted Saudi oil exports.

It is widely accepted that Iran backs the Houthis, though the group also operates independently of Tehran.

The attacks on Saudi Arabia are certainly....