September 2015 Marib Toshka missile attack

Overview

On 4 September 2015, the Houthis launched an OTR-21 Tochka ballistic missile against a military base in Safer, an area in Marib Governorate. The base was being used by military forces of the Saudi-led coalition. The missile hit an ammunition dump, creating a huge explosion which inflicted numerous casualties among coalition troops. 52 Emirati, ten Saudi, five Bahraini soldiers and 36 pro-Hadi Yemeni troops were killed in the attack.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The September 2015 Tochka missile strike on the coalition base at Safer in Marib Governorate was among the deadliest single attacks on Saudi-led coalition forces in the Yemeni Civil War. The OTR-21 ballistic missile struck an ammunition dump, triggering a secondary explosion that killed 52 Emirati, ten Saudi, five Bahraini, and 36 pro-Hadi Yemeni soldiers. The scale of Emirati losses in particular marked the attack as a significant blow to coalition cohesion and demonstrated the Houthis' capacity to employ ballistic missiles with effect against fixed military installations. The strike underscored the vulnerability of coalition logistics and staging areas in Marib Governorate to precision or area-effect missile attack, complicating the coalition's operational posture in a governorate that held strategic value as both a front line and an energy-producing region.

Forces & casualties