The Wall Street Journal reported last week that, according to U.S. officials, a drone-bomb attack on a Saudi oil pumping station on 14 May 2019 was launched not by Houthi fighters in Yemen but by Iran-backed Shia paramilitary forces (“militias”) in Iraq.

The attack, in other words, came from a direction different from the one originally posited.  The U.S. officials cited in the report said also that the attack used assets different from the ones used previously by the Houthis.  The officials apparently didn’t go into detail on this, but it’s likely that they fingered the Iran-backed militias in Iraq because the signature of the strike was similar to the assets Iran has been using to probe Israel’s defenses in the north.

The drone-bomb, in particular, may well have looked like the drone-bomb Israel downed back in February 2018, which approached Israeli air space from Syria and had originated from a compound south of Damascus controlled by Iran.

I  call it a drone-bomb, incidentally, because it’s not an “armed drone” in the sense that it releases a missile or bomb of some kind and then departs.  The drone itself is the delivery mechanism for the warhead.  The reporting on the 14 May attack in Saudi Arabia has indicated that that’s what we’re talking about.  The attempt against Israel involved the same apparatus: a drone-bomb.