SANAA (Dispatches) – Yemeni army soldiers, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, have reportedly carried out an aerial attack against an important military target in the country’s western coastal province of Hudaydah in retaliation for the Saudi-led devastating military aggression against their impoverished homeland.
A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that Yemeni troopers and their allies attacked a command center of Saudi troops and Saudi-sponsored militiamen loyal to Yemen's former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, using a domestically-built Qasef-1 (Striker-1) combat drone on Monday afternoon.
There were no immediate reports about possible casualties and the extent of damage caused at the site.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating military campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing the government of Hadi back to power and crushing the country’s Houthi Ansarullah movement.
Some 15,000 Yemenis have been killed and thousands more injured since the onset of the Saudi-led aggression.
More than 2,200 others have died of cholera, and the crisis has triggered what the United Nations has described as the world's worst humanitarian disaster.
Saudi Arabia has intensified its invasion of Yemen as the United Nations special envoy for the violence-scarred country visits the capital Sana’a in an attempt to cobble together a conflict resolution mechanism.
On Sunday, Saudi warplanes killed seven civilians, including women and children, in Bayda, attacking the central Yemeni province’s town of Radman. Eight others were also wounded in the attack.
Earlier in the day, two people lost their lives in a missile attack on the northern province of Sa’ada, and four more died in airstrikes on the southwestern province of al-Hudaydah.
Also on Sunday, the UN official Martin Griffiths arrived in the capital to meet with officials from Yemen’s popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.
The movement took over Yemen’s affairs in 2015 after Yemen’s former government resigned and its head, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, fled to Riyadh, leaving the country in political turmoil.
A Saudi-led coalition has been attacking Yemen ever since, trying unsuccessfully to restore the former Riyadh-allied officials. So far, around 15,000 have died during the invasion.
Griffiths invited the Houthis and the former officials to talks in Geneva in early September in an attempt to restore a UN-backed negotiation process that had broken off in 2016.
The Houthi representatives, however, could not attend the talks after Saudi Arabia refused to allow an Omani airplane, which had been meant to fly the officials, to land on the Yemeni soil.