SANA’A (Dispatches) -- Yemeni forces have shot down a U.S.-built ScanEagle spy drone flying over the central province of Ma’rib which is the center of fierce clashes with Saudi-backed militants.
Spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, tweeted Saturday that the Yemeni air defense forces and their allies used a domestically-developed surface-to-air missile to shoot down the unmanned aerial vehicle as it was carrying out hostile acts in the skies of the Medghal district.
He noted that further details about the operation and its footage will be released in the near future.
The Boeing Insitu ScanEagle is a small, long-endurance, low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing, and is used for reconnaissance.
Back on June 22, the Yemeni army forces and their allies shot down a Saudi ScanEagle reconnaissance drone as the aircraft was flying over al-Mushajah area in the Sirwah district of Ma’rib province.
A day earlier, the media bureau of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement released the video of Yemeni air defense forces and their allies intercepting and shooting down the same type of unmanned aerial vehicle with a surface-to-air missile over the Sirwah district.
Forces of the Saudi-led military coalition and their mercenaries violated 137 times during the past 24 hours a ceasefire agreement between warring sides for the western coastal province of Hudaydah.
Yemen’s official Saba news agency, citing an unnamed source in Yemen’s Liaison and Coordination Officers Operations Room, reported that the violations included nine reconnaissance flights over various regions, including al-Durayhimi, al-Jabaliya and al-Tuhayta districts, in addition to 24 counts of artillery shelling and 100 shooting incidents.

Saudi Arabia, backed by the U.S. and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crushing Ansarullah movement.
Yemeni armed forces and allied Popular Committees have, however, gone from strength to strength against the Saudi-led invaders, and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases.