RIYADH (Dispatches) – The Saudi-led coalition said on Sunday the Yemeni Army group has fired 430 retaliatory ballistic missiles and 851 armed drones at Saudi Arabia since it waged a bloody war against Yemenis since 2015.
The spokesman of the Saudi alliance, General Turki al-Malki, claimed the Yemeni Army had been using Sana’a airport as a base to launch attacks on the kingdom, but Yemeni officials denied allegation.
The Saudi-led coalition uses the allegation as a pretext to target the Sana’a airport and cripple the supply of food and medicine for Yemeni civilians.
The coalition has claimed that its recent attacks on the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, were against military targets and that Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement is involved in Yemen.
Yemeni Information Minister Daifullah al-Shami says the recent claims made by the Saudi war on Yemen come as the alliance has no justification left for its aggression on the impoverished country.
Speaking in an interview with Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network, al-Shami described the claims as “a broken record” to justify the attacks on civilians in Yemen.
He noted that the Saudi-led coalition resorts to “flimsy excuses” to justify the massacres it commits in Yemen.
The minister noted that Saudi Arabia intensified its attacks on Sana’a International Airport in response to international pressure to reopen the airport.
A-Shami argued that Saudi Arabia launched the war on Yemen because of Sana’a’s support for the Palestinian cause.
He said the Palestinian cause “is our central and first cause, and the aggression was launched on us to stop that direction in Yemen.”
The minister refuted Saudi claims that commanders of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement are supporting the Yemeni forces in their fight against the Saudi-led coalition, saying, “The Saudi coalition talks about the presence of Iranian experts and [experts] from Hezbollah [in Yemen], and does not provide any evidence.”
“If we had experts from Hezbollah and Iran providing [us] with support, we would be proud of them.”
Al-Shami also said that Saudi Arabia was surprised by a retaliatory Yemeni attack that hit targets deep within its soil, noting that the kingdom is “unable to confront the Yemeni fighters and the weapons they make.”
Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi’s government back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah resistance movement.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there.