Saturday, 25 July 2026

Houthi missile and drone swarm sets Jizan refinery ablaze, strikes Yanbu — oil holds above $100 after a 40% July climb

Houthi forces struck Saudi Aramco-affiliated facilities in Jizan and Yanbu with dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones. It is the group's first direct attack on Saudi oil infrastructure since 2022, presented as retaliation for Saudi strikes on Hodeidah and Kamaran Island. Satellite fire detection picked up the Jizan blaze in the early hours. The refinery processes roughly 400,000 barrels per day, and Yanbu matters even more as the Red Sea export route Saudi Arabia has relied on since Hormuz closed. Brent held above $100, up roughly 40 percent in July alone. The line that has been crossed is this: the campaign has moved from harassing tankers to setting fixed energy infrastructure on fire. That kind of target cannot be rerouted, reflagged or insured around. For European organisations the exposure comes through energy prices and supply-chain friction rather than direct threat. But if your firm has staff, projects or contractors in the Gulf, the wider target set changes site-risk assumptions for industrial facilities across the region. Operators of critical infrastructure everywhere should note the method too. Saturating high-value fixed assets with cheap munitions is a template, and templates travel.

Mission Support's advisory and intelligence team helps you turn attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure into clear site-risk and continuity decisions.

After thirteen nights, quiet: no new US strikes announced as Washington signals talks are "getting more serious"

The US military finished a thirteenth night of strikes on Iran and then announced nothing for the following night, the first gap in the campaign in two weeks. President Trump signalled that talks with Tehran are "getting more serious." Put next to the Houthi refinery strikes of the same day, the conflict looks to be splitting in two. The state-to-state front may be moving toward a negotiated pause while the proxy front escalates against Saudi Arabia. That mix is dangerous for planners. Headline de-escalation will tempt organisations to relax just as the remaining threat becomes less predictable and harder to attribute. The sensible line for the coming days: treat the strike pause as unconfirmed until it has lasted through the weekend, and keep regional travel approvals at their current threshold. Watch two signs that have mattered before: whether CENTCOM's silence lasts beyond 48 hours, and whether Iran's proxies in Iraq and Yemen follow the pause or exploit it. Duty of care does not pause on a signal. It pauses on a pattern.

Van driven into crowd at Berlin Pride festival: one dead, at least sixteen injured

A van was driven into a crowd at the closing party of Berlin's Pride festival in the Tiergarten area at around 10 p.m. One person was killed and at least sixteen injured, several seriously. The driver initially fled and police launched a major manhunt overnight. The attack hit the hardest moment of any large open-air event to protect: the closing phase. Formal perimeters dissolve, crowds are dense but dispersing, stewarding is winding down and attention has moved to getting people out. European event security has invested heavily in hostile-vehicle mitigation since the attacks of the last decade. That investment is concentrated on the advertised core, such as parade routes, stages and entry corridors, while the informal edges of an event stay open to anyone with a vehicle and intent. Amsterdam's WorldPride opened the same day, and a summer of festivals lies ahead. The lesson for every event organiser in Europe is to extend vehicle mitigation to the dispersal phase and the unofficial gathering points. Rehearse the first minutes of the response (casualty care, crowd direction, scene control), because they decide outcomes before emergency services arrive in force.

Mission Support's guarding teams cover the moments that formal event perimeters miss, such as dispersal, informal gathering points and the overnight changeover.

China puts export controls on fourteen European companies — defence and dual-use supply chains in the crossfire

Beijing added fourteen European entities to its export-control list, among them Germany's Rheinmetall, Czech truck maker Tatra, French drone developer Cavok UAS, and optoelectronics firms in Poland and Lithuania. With immediate effect, Chinese dual-use items, including certain rare-earth materials, may no longer be exported to the named companies. The move retaliates for the EU's latest Russia-sanctions package, which targeted Chinese and Hong Kong companies. The message for European industry is that defence-related supply chains are now an active front in economic statecraft. Exposure is not limited to the fourteen names. Their suppliers, subcontractors and logistics partners inherit the disruption, and any European firm in defence, drones, optics or advanced materials should assume it could be listed next. The security risk adds to the commercial one. Companies rushing to re-source restricted inputs under time pressure are the most exposed to too-good-to-be-true intermediaries, grey-market brokers and the counter-intelligence risks both bring. Urgent procurement is an attack surface, so apply proportionate due diligence to any new supplier found this quarter.

Mission Support's TSCM team sweeps the meeting rooms where re-sourcing and defence-programme decisions are discussed.

WorldPride opens in Amsterdam: fourteen days of city-wide events, Europe's largest crowd-security operation of the summer

Amsterdam's first WorldPride opened its fourteen-day run, with hundreds of events across the city leading up to the Canal Parade on 1 August and a closing march a week later. As a security operation it is unlike a stadium or festival site. The venue is the city itself: canals, squares, parks and nightlife districts. Open access is a founding principle, and visitor numbers will strain transport hubs, emergency response times and camera coverage for two full weeks. Every discipline is needed at once. There is crowd management on water as well as land, hostile-vehicle mitigation where crowds are densest, and protection for high-profile guests and delegations. On top of that, hotels and venues are full, with all the compromises on access control that brings. For businesses inside the event area the preparations are unglamorous but decisive. Brief staff on changed access and delivery times. Check that camera coverage and alarm response actually work before the peak weekends. Agree escalation contacts with neighbours and the municipal security network. The news from Berlin that evening, hours after the Amsterdam opening, put the whole European Pride calendar under a sharper threat picture from day one.

Mission Support's hospitality security team supports hotels and venues running at full occupancy during events like WorldPride.

Minor arrested placing explosive at Wormer home — the residential end of the Netherlands' explosives wave

Dutch police arrested a minor in the act of placing an explosive at a home in Wormer, a town that had already seen a blast earlier in July. It is a small case, but it shows two big national trends. First, explosive attacks have spread from commercial premises to intimidation at people's homes, often linked to conflicts in the drug trade, extortion of family members or pressure on witnesses. Second, the perpetrators are more and more often minors, recruited through social media as disposable hired hands for a few hundred euros. Police have warned about this model all year. It separates the attack from the person who ordered it and fills the pipeline with people too young to be deterred in any meaningful way. You may become a target as a business owner in a dispute, a professional connected to criminal proceedings or a relative of someone involved. If so, treat the first incident or threat as the start of a campaign, not a one-off. That means home CCTV that someone actually monitors, better lighting and harder approach routes, agreed police contact and, if the threat justifies it, a professional assessment of your home security. Because the person placing the device has no history with the target, deterrence has to work on the approach, not on the relationship.

Mission Support carries out residential security assessments for people facing a credible threat, including intimidation at their home.

Rotterdam man caught mid-campaign after 740,000 smishing texts impersonating the Tax Authority, Chamber of Commerce and Microsoft

Police announced the arrest of a 22-year-old Rotterdam man caught in the middle of a campaign. Hundreds of fraudulent text messages were going out from his equipment as officers entered, and victim data was still coming in. Investigators link him to at least 740,000 smishing messages sent in five weeks, posing as the Tax Authority, the Chamber of Commerce and Microsoft. His infrastructure was seized and the linked phishing sites were taken down. The scale is the story. One person, working alone from home, ran a fraud campaign that reached three-quarters of a million people: industrial social engineering at retail cost. For organisations, the risk is that these exact lures (Belastingdienst payment demands, KvK verification requests, Microsoft security alerts) land on employees' phones. Those include the phones that carry corporate mail and authenticator apps, and SMS sits outside most corporate filtering. Build smishing scenarios into awareness training and give staff an easy internal channel to report suspicious texts. Make sure finance teams check any change to payment details through a known second channel, however official the message looks. The arrest removes one operator, but his tools are off the shelf and the next campaign is already running.

Mission Support's cyber security team helps you set up the awareness training and verification routines that make smishing and similar fraud much harder to pull off.