SANAA (Dispatches) – The Yemeni army has inflicted heavy human and material losses on Saudi Arabian-backed militants during attacks in northwestern Yemen.

On Saturday, the Yemeni army struck the positions of a group of militants backing Yemen’s former Riyadh-allied regime the al-Mahashamah and al-Yatmah districts of al-Jawf Province, Yemen’s al-Masirah television reported.

The attacks killed and injured a large number of the militants and destroyed much of their military hardware, it reported. A number of the militants also reportedly surrendered themselves to the army.

The militants have been receiving logistical and arms support from Riyadh to further its goal of restoring the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to power. Hadi had resigned back in 2015 but later sought to reclaim power.

The Yemeni army and Houthi fighters, who are helping the army fight off a Saudi Arabian-led war of aggression, also caused an unspecified number of casualties in similar attacks against Saudi mercenaries in the southwestern Yemeni province of Ta’izz on Friday. The operations also destroyed 20 military and armored vehicles, while three vehicles belonging to pro-Hadi forces were destroyed in the nearby Sana’a Province’s Nihm District.

Meanwhile, Yemeni army soldiers, backed by fighters from allied Popular Committees, have shot dead three Saudi soldiers in the kingdom’s southwestern border region of Jizan, in retaliation for the Riyadh regime’s military campaign against the crisis-hit country.   

An unnamed military source told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that Yemeni forces and their allies shot and killed the soldiers in al-Ghawi village as well as al-Shabakeh and al-Dokhan military camps in the region, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, on Friday evening.

Furthermore, Yemeni forces fired a solid propellant Zelzal-2 (Earthquake-2) missile at a position of Saudi mercenaries in the Mawza district of Yemen’s southern province of Ta’izz, leaving scores of them dead and injured.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in 2015. Much of the country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The Saudi-led war has also triggered a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.

According to the World Health Organization’s latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April 2017 and is suspected to have infected 841,906.

In November 2017, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, said more than 11 million children in Yemen were in acute need of aid, stressing that it was estimated that every 10 minutes a child died of a preventable disease there.