SANA’A (Dispatches) – The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is reportedly looting Yemen’s energy resources to pay for recent multi-billion-dollar arms deals with France, which are designed to boost Abu Dhabi’s air power amid its deadly Saudi-led war against Yemen.
Yemen’s al-Khabar al-Yemeni news website, citing informed sources who preferred not to be named, reported that French Ambassador to Yemen Jean-Marie Safa met with a number of UAE-allied tribal chiefs from the southern Yemeni province of Shabwah on Saturday, as part of efforts to restart the main liquefied natural gas (LNG) production facility in the area under a deal with Abu Dhabi.
The report added that the meeting focused on operational measures at the Belhaf LNG facility, where French multinational oil and gas company TotalEnergies SE owns and controls more than 50% of the shares.
Earlier, the new Shabwah provincial governor, Awad Mohammed Abdullah al-Awlaki, had said the Balhaf facility would come on stream in the near future.
The report comes as French Defense Minister Florence Parly tweeted on Friday that Paris would boost the United Arab Emirates’ missile system after a series of retaliatory ballistic missile and drone attacks by Yemeni Armed Forces.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies, backed by the United States and European powers, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah resistance movement.
The Saudi-led coalition took various provinces across the impoverished country under more than 30 new airstrikes as Riyadh’s war of aggression on Yemen intensifies amid major military gains by the Yemeni army.
Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported the assaults on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, specifying the targeted provinces as the west-central province of Ma’rib, the Sana’a and al-Jawf provinces that neighbor it respectively to the west and north, and the northwestern provinces of Hajjah and Sa’ada.
The Saudi-led 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 there.
Yemen’s National Salvation Government recounted the drastically fatal effect that a 2015-to-present Saudi-led blockade of the country has on the lives of thousands of cancer-stricken children.
“Over 3,000 children with cancer are at risk of dying as a result of the imposed U.S.-Saudi siege, deprived of receiving the necessary healthcare,” the administration’s Health Minister Taha al-Mutawakil said, Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported on Saturday.
The Yemeni minister confirmed in another part of his remarks that the siege had brought about the closure of the lifeline Sana’a International Airport in the Yemeni capital, an unwelcome development that neither allows the patients to go abroad to seek treatment, nor allows entry of the required medicine into the country.
“The aggression prevents entry of nuclear medicine, which is needed to treat cancer patients,” the minister noted.
The minister stressed that the opening of Sana’a International Airport is a humanitarian urgency, calling for the airport to be considered as a neutral zone and an outlet that must be opened in order to allow patients to travel.