SANA’A (Dispatchers) – A senior member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council slammed recent U.S. sanctions on Sunday and warned about possible strikes against “aggressor countries”.
“Sanctions do not scare the [Yemeni] fighters,” the head of the council Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said on Twitter.
“If they continue the blockade and aggression, then perhaps there will be strikes on unexpected sites in some aggressor countries,” he said.
The remarks were in response to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Thursday decision to impose sanctions on the country’s Ansarullah movement’s two military officials involved in a push to liberate Yemen’s strategic and energy-rich Ma’rib region.
In 2020, Yemeni forces launched an operation in the province of Ma’rib, an oil-rich part of Yemen which is the last stronghold of the former regime in the north of the country, to reclaim the area.
In another development, Yemeni army forces shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle belonging to the Saudi-led military coalition over Yemen’s northern province of al-Jawf.
Spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree said air defense forces targeted the CH-4 combat drone with a surface-to-air missile which has not been unveiled yet.
The aircraft was on a reconnaissance mission over al-Maraziq area in the Khabb wa ash Sha’af district of the province early Sunday morning, he said.
It would not be a “picnic” for anyone to enter the Yemeni airspace because the country’s armed forces protect it, Saree said.
The CH-4 drone has a 3,500- to 5,000-kilometer range and a 30- to 40-hour endurance. It is capable of carrying six missiles and a payload of up to 250 to 345 kilogram.
The unmanned aerial vehicle can fire air-to-ground missiles from an altitude of 5,000 meters, enabling it to stay outside of effective range of most anti-aircraft systems.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the U.S. and other regional allies, launched a devastating war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing Ansarullah.
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 Saudi-led military aggression has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions of people. The Saudi war has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases across the country.