SANAA (Dispatches) – Hundreds of thousands of people have gathered in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, to mark the third anniversary of the country’s September 21 Revolution and condemn the bloody Saudi war against the nation.
The demonstrators in Thursday's mass rally reaffirmed their commitment to the government in Sana’a and the Yemeni forces defending the country against an ongoing Saudi war.
Large crowds from across the country flocked to Sana’a to mark the occasion.
A convoy of UAE military forces captured by Yemeni forces during their operations was also displayed at the rally. The military equipment was being used by Saudi-led troops and pro-Riyadh militia fighting on the ground against the Yemeni army, which is backed by the Houthi Ansarullah fighters and popular groups.
In September 2014, the Ansarullah fighters took state matters in their hands in Sana’a amid the absence of an efficient government there.
Before gaining control of the capital, the Houthis had set a deadline for the political parties to put aside differences and fill the power vacuum, but the deadline was missed without any change in the impoverished country’s political scene.
However, the former Saudi-backed president, Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi, later stepped down, refusing a call by the Houthi movement to reconsider the move.
Hadi then fled to Saudi Arabia, which launched a military campaign against Yemen along with a number of its allies in March 2015 to reinstall Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.
In a speech aired on al-Masirah TV on the anniversary of the revolution, leader of the Ansarullah movement Abdul-Malik al-Houthi slammed the Saudi-led war against the country.
He praised the existing diversity in Yemen’s social fabric and warned that the enemy, including the US, Israel and the Saudi-led coalition, seeks to use such differences to create divisions in the country and disintegrate Yemen.
More than 12,000 people have been killed since the onset of the Saudi military campaign more than two and a half years ago. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.
In a latest incident, at least four civilians were killed and five others injured when Saudi military aircraft carried out an airstrike on Yemen’s northwestern province of Hajjah as Riyadh continues with its atrocious aerial bombardment campaign against its conflict-plagued southern neighbor.
Local sources told Lebanon-based Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network that the fighter jets targeted a passenger car as it was traveling along a road in the Abs district of the province, located approximately 130 kilometers northwest of the capital Sana’a, on Thursday afternoon.
The development came only two days after four women and five children lost their lives when Saudi fighter jets bombarded a residential building in the Kushar district of the same Yemeni province.
Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the victims as members of the same family.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s official news agency, SPA, reported that four soldiers had been killed during fierce clashes with Yemeni fighters from the Houthi Ansarullah movement in the kingdom’s southwestern border regions of Najran and Jizan.
The report did not provide any information about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the soldiers.