SANAA (Dispatches) – The
Yemeni army claimed a retaliatory drone attack on a refinery in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Thursday morning, that caused a fire.
It targeted a Saudi Aramco refinery in Riyadh using three Samad-3 drones, its military spokesman Yahya Sarea said on Friday. Six Samad-1 drones were also fired at Aramco facilities in the Saudi cities of Jizan and Abha.
The attack caused a small fire in Riyadh that was controlled and did not result in any injuries or casualties, Saudi state news agency SPA reported early on Friday, citing an energy ministry official.
“The refinery’s operations and supplies of petroleum and its derivatives were not affected,” the statement said.
Saudi officials regularly tend to depict such operations as insignificant when the scope of the damage is usually revealed later on.
The world’s top oil exporter has faced frequent missile and drone assaults by Yemen’s army which has been battling a coalition of war led by Riyadh for seven years against the impoverished nation.
Sarea said the attacks were carried out in response to the coalition blocking the entry of fuel into Yemen, where ongoing fuel shortages are getting worse.
Air and sea access to Yemen is controlled by the coalition which claims restrictions are needed to prevent arms smuggling.
Essam al-Mutawakel, a spokesman for the Yemen Petroleum Company (YPC), said earlier this month that the Arab country was experiencing the toughest crisis since the start of the Saudi aggression and siege nearly seven years ago.
Yemen’s Minister of Oil and Minerals Ahmad Abdullah Dares has warned that the Saudi seizure of ships carrying petroleum products to Yemen could lead to the suspension of the service sectors and cause “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies — including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — launched a brutal war against Yemen in March 2015. The war was meant to eliminate Yemen’s popular Ansarullah movement and reinstall a former regime. The conflict, accompanied by a tight siege, has failed to reach its goals, but has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people.
The Saudi-led coalition has been preventing fuel shipments from reaching Yemen, while looting the impoverished nation’s resources.
The UN says more than 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger. The world body also refers to the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The Saudi war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories.