صراط عشق صراط عشق
A Reuters witness in the capital heard two loud blasts and saw billows of smoke in the sky over Riyadh close to dawn. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.
“A large number of winged ballistic missiles and drones targeted the capital of the Saudi enemy … pounding military headquarters and centers including the defense ministry, intelligence agency and (King) Salman Air Base,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said in a televised speech.
He said retaliatory attacks were also launched against military sites in the southern Saudi cities of Najran and Jizan that border Yemen.
Tensions between the two sides have surged after the expiry last month of a six-week ceasefire prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. The Houthi movement and its allies in the Yemeni army have responded to Saudi airstrikes with cross-border missile and drone attacks.
Saree said the military operation came in response to the “unjust embargo and brutal aggression” against Yemen, vowing to conduct more such retaliation against the kingdom until the siege is lifted and its war comes to an end.
Saudi military spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said in a statement that the Yemeni retaliation attack on Riyadh was a “deliberate hostile action designed to target civilians”.
He did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment on the Yemeni report that the retaliatory attack had struck the defense ministry and air base.
In a statement on Saudi state news agency SPA, Malki claimed that Riyadh on Tuesday intercepted three missiles fired towards Najran and Jizan, and several armed drones launched towards the kingdom late on Monday.
Houthis spokesman Muhammed Abdulsalam warned Saudi Arabia and its allies in the war to take the latest Yemeni operation seriously.
“Stopping the aggression and lifting the siege is a humanitarian and national goal for the oppressed Yemeni people,” he tweeted. The operation, he said signals that the Yemeni army’s next action will be “more severe”.
Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall a Riyadh-backed former regime. The kingdom has achieved none of its goals thanks to the Yemeni resistance and instead got bogged down in a protracted conflict.
The Saudi military aggression, coupled with a naval blockade, has killed hundreds of thousands of people and plunged Yemen into what the UN says the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
On Tuesday, Yemen’s national commission for the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) urged the world body to reconsider its decision to remove the Saudi-led military coalition from its blacklist of child-killers and instead refer such crimes to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In a statement, the Yemeni commission censured the UN’s recent pro-Saudi move, describing it as a major failure for the world body and its humanitarian principles.
The UN decision ignores the confessions of members of the Saudi-led coalition regarding the massacre of Yemeni kids and legal reports issued by the UN’s own bodies that prove the coalition’s involvement in the killings, starvation and beatings of Yemeni children, it said.
The UN decision is a sign of “mercy” for the atrocities of the Saudi regime and its allies, paving the way for the military coalition to commit even more crimes with impunity and disregard of international law, said the commission.
The retaliation is the biggest since 2019 when Saudi state oil giant Aramco’s facilities were dealt extensive damage in Yemen’s drone and missile attacks.
The United States, which got its costly air defense and radar systems in the kingdom napping, claimed that the attacks had been carried out by Iran.
Washington has proposed a UN Security Council resolution citing the 2019 attack on Saudi oil facilities, proposing an extension of an arms embargo against the Islamic Republic, sources said on Tuesday.
The embargo, put in place as part of a nuclear accord signed with Teheran in 2015, is set to expire in October, but Washington has been working to extend the ban.
No date has been scheduled for a vote on the resolution and it is unlikely to pass, as veto-wielding China and Russia have already spoken out against extending the embargo.
However, Yemen’s new phenomenal relation against Saudi Arabia is set to give the United States added pretext to go full frontal in his campaign against Iran.
