Why Does Targeting Abha Airport Appear Important According to Saudi Calculations

Ishaq Al-Masawi |
The Asir region in general is among the five Saudi regions that will host the 2034 World Cup. It is the first Saudi region for which the Royal Court has approved its own strategy under the name “Asir Development Strategy.”
Saudi Arabia has allocated an annual development budget of 50 billion riyals. The government paid half of the budget and invited businessmen to contribute the other half.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally set the overall goal of the strategy: to make Asir a year-round global tourist destination. He personally oversees its implementation step by step.
This sudden and unprecedented interest in the Asir region is not fundamentally subject to developmental justice, which has been absent from this region and all southern regions, specifically since their seizure in the 1930s, as testified by the American ambassador who visited the southern regions in the early 2000s and came away with this impression.
This interest is subject to purely economic and tourism considerations, within efforts to reduce reliance on energy sources, as the region enjoys a unique diversity of terrain unmatched in all of Saudi Arabia’s geography—picturesque mountainous nature and a 130 km coastline—thus forming a tributary to these efforts.
Returning to Abha Airport, the region’s emirate began developing the old airport to accommodate 1.5 million passengers annually, while focusing its efforts on creating a new airport inspired by the region’s identity, with international specifications that could accommodate 13 million passengers annually, with its first phase to be delivered in 2028.
Today, we are facing a strategic dimension that has pushed the center (Riyadh) to pay attention to Asir, which was marginalized from the development train according to systematic central policies since the 1930s. Were it not for the fact that Asir would form a tributary to the