Reuters reported on Oct. 2 that last month, Pakistan sent four cargo planes with military equipment, according to a Pakistani official, a Gulf official, and a Western diplomat. Turkish drones, bought by Saudi Arabia before the current war, have also been deployed over Yemen, they added.

Meanwhile, in response to the attacks on Sana’a, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at an Aramco facility in Riyadh, setting it afire.

Pakistan has deployed between 30,000 and 40,000 troops to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom’s land borders and help with drone and missile interceptions, according to another Pakistani official, who said the troops arrived in waves beginning last year but also after the recent escalation. Islamabad hasn’t made any decision to send troops into Yemen in a fighting capacity, the official said.

Heavy fighting continues to be reported in Yemen’s Taiz province, as Houthi forces work to try to cut off Taiz city from the de facto national capital, Aden, and government forces, with Saudi support, launch strikes all over Houthi-controlled territory, including in Sana’a itself. The Yemeni government claimed that it had inflicted 1,540 casualties–killed and wounded–on Huothi forces in 474 operations over 24 hours, across all fronts but mostly on the Taiz front. Military spokesman Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili said that the raids included warplanes, drones, artillery, missiles and rocket launchers.

Ahmed Nagi, Yemen expert at the Crisis Group, told The National that Taiz will be a very difficult target for the Houthis to take, as it has been a center of resistance to the Houthis since long before the civil war began in 2015. “If the Houthis continue to intensify their attacks and try to capture Taiz, it is likely to cost them heavily in both fighters and time,” he said. “The fighting is already extremely intense, and everything we are seeing suggests that taking the city would be a very difficult operation for them at this stage.”