TEHRAN, May 21 - Yemeni armed forces, led by the Houthi Ansarullah movement, have launched a drone strike on an arms depot at the airport in Saudi Arabia’s southern Najran region in retaliation for the kingdom’s bloody military aggression against the impoverished country.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - The Houthi-run al-Masirah TV channel reported that the attack had been carried out by a Qasef-2K combat drone on Tuesday, causing a fire at the airport.
However, the Saudi-led coalition, which has been waging the war on Yemen since March 2015, claimed that a civilian facility in Najran had been targeted with an explosive-laden drone.
In a statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA), coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Maliki said the Houthis had been posing “a real threat to regional and international security by targeting civilian objects and civilian facilities.”
He did not, however, give further details of the drone attack, which came a week after Yemeni drones targeted the East-West pipeline in the heart of Saudi Arabia, forcing the state oil giant Aramco to temporarily halt pumping oil on the vital pipeline.
The Houthi movement, which both runs Yemen’s state affairs and defends the country against the Saudi-led aggression, said the drone attacks were in response to the regime’s crimes against the Yemeni nation.
On Sunday, Ansarullah warned that the drone attacks on the oil pipeline were the the start of operations against 300 vital targets in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Yemen.
Maliki had on Monday claimed that the Houthis had fired two ballistic missiles toward the cities of Mecca and Jeddah, but both had been intercepted by Saudi air defense forces.
The Yemeni fighters, however, denied such missile attacks, stressing that they would not target holy sites while defending their country against the Saudi-led war.
“The Saudi regime is trying, through these allegations, to rally support for its brutal aggression against our great Yemeni people,” Yemen’s armed forces spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Sare'e said in a posting on Facebook.
Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam also stressed that the Riyadh regime had “fabricated the lie” about targeting Mecca to divert attention from what is happening in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war against Yemen in an attempt to reinstall the Riyadh-allied former regime and crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
The invaders have, however, failed to achieve their objectives in the face of the Yemeni resistance.
The Western-backed aggression, coupled with a naval blockade, has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis, destroyed the country’s infrastructure and led to a humanitarian crisis.
Yemeni fighters regularly target positions inside Saudi Arabia in retaliatory attacks against the protracted offensive on their homeland.
Source: Press TV
Your Comment