SANA’A (Press TV) – A senior member of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement says territorial gains achieved by Yemeni army forces and their allied fighters in battles against Saudi-led coalition troops forced the United States to recognize his group as a legitimate actor in the war-battered Arab country.
“The confession of the U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen [Timothy Lenderking] to Ansarullah’s legitimacy is an implicit acknowledgment that Washington is spearheading the war on Yemen,” Abdul-Wahhab al-Mahbashi told Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television on Thursday evening.
“Territorial gains forced the United States to recognize Ansarullah as a legitimate party in Yemen,” he emphasized.
Earlier in the day, Lenderking told a webinar sponsored by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations that he hoped for a ceasefire between the Saudi-led coalition and the Ansarullah movement to alleviate the Yemen crisis.
“My experience from the Houthis (Ansarullah) is that they have spoken about a commitment towards peace in Yemen.... We continue to engage with them,” he said.
“The United States recognizes them as a legitimate actor, we recognize them as a group that has made significant gains. No one can wish for them (to be) away or out of the conflict, so let’s deal with realities that exist on the ground,” Lenderking pointed out.
Separately, a high-ranking member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council stressed that the Ansarullah movement’s legitimacy emanates from its might and resistance in the face of the Saudi war and brutal all-out siege.
Mohammad Ali al-Houthi noted that the United States must stop keeping the Yemeni nation hungry, and end enforcing aggression and blockade against them.
A Saudi-led coalition began waging a hugely indiscriminate war on Yemen in 2015. The war has been seeking to restore power to Yemen’s former officials, who have been loyal friends to Riyadh and trying to deploy the kingdom’s agendas in its southern neighbor.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis have died and the entire country, which was already the Arab world’s poorest nation, has been pushed close to the brink of outright famine.
Yemen’s army and Popular Committees have, however, never laid down their arms in the face of the heavily Western-armed coalition.
In a latest development, Yemen’s air force unleashes a sizeable drone squad onto a training camp located in southwestern Saudi Arabia, killing and injuring scores of Saudi-led mercenaries and the Saudi military’s own officers.
The spokesman for the Yemeni armed forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, announced the development on Thursday night, Yemen’s official Saba news agency reported.
The attack took place two days earlier against a military training camp based in the Saudi region of Najran’s al-Wadiah area, he said.
“The operation was carried out using 10 Qasef-2K drones. It targeted the command center, training sections, and other parts of the barracks,” the spokesman stated.
According to Saree, the UAVs staged “accurate” attacks against their targets, killing and injuring as many as 60 mercenaries, including a number of their senior commanders.
“A number of Saudi officers were also killed during the attack,” he said, adding that images pertaining to the counterstrike had been recorded and would be published in the future.