SANA’A (Dispatches) –
Retaliatory attacks against targets in Saudi Arabia by Yemeni armed forces have doubled in the first nine months of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, according to a report.
Yemeni forces are “orchestrating an increasingly intense irregular warfare campaign against Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf,” said the report by the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
It said popular forces have played a critical role in providing weapons, technology, training, and other assistance to the group.
The CSIS said it analyzed 4,103 Yemeni attacks against Saudi Arabia, within Yemen, and against other targets in the Persian Gulf between 1 January 2016 and 20 October 2021.
According to the research, during the first nine months of 2020, Yemeni forces executed a monthly average of 38 attacks but during the same period in 2021, that number rose to an average of 78 attacks, with a total of 702 attacks across the nine-month period.
This increase was largely driven by the Yemeni operation in Ma’rib, where 199 attacks took place during the first nine months of 2021, it said.
Yemeni forces also carried out 133 total attacks in August 2021 alone—the highest single-month tally since at least January 2016. These attacks, however, were not equally distributed across geographic areas, it added.
In recent days, Saudi Arabia has also upped the ante in the war on Yemen by conducting a new round of airstrikes targeting various areas across the crisis-hit country.
Yemen’s al-Masirah television network reported that Saudi warplanes carried out 15 air raids against the Wadi Obaida district, and another 14 against the Sirwah district in Ma’rib province.
Saudi military aircraft also launched five airstrikes against the Jubah district in the same Yemeni province
A senior member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council denounced the latest Saudi airstrikes against Sana’a airport as a “grave” war crime, dismissing the Saudi-led coalition’s peace proposals as “unfounded and groundless.”
“Repetitive attacks against Sana’a International Airport, which is used to transport Yemeni patients as well as travelers, amount to terrorism against the Republic of Yemen,” Mohammed Ali al-Houthi wrote in a series of posts published on his Twitter page.
He added, “We do not expect the United Nations to take a firm stance against this crime, as it has always been the case with the crimes being perpetrated by the Saudi-led coalition of aggression.”