Ansarullah Says Yemeni Drone Raids on Saudi Arabia Had No Links to Iran

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, Mohammad Ali al-Houthi, the chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee of Yemen, stated that Yemeni forces used domestically-built drones to target the East-West oil pipeline, which runs from Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province to the Red Sea.

Iran, he added, had no role in the counter-attacks, which hit two pumping stations in the heart of the kingdom and forced oil giant Aramco to stop pumping crude on the vital 1,200-kilometer pipeline.

He noted that Ansarullah forces have been defending the country against the Saudi-led invasion for four years, and that they were not acting “on behalf of Iran”.

He also dismissed as “ridiculous” claims that Iran provides Yemeni forces with missiles, saying “even a single piece of bread cannot get past the siege” imposed the Saudi-led coalition of aggressors against Yemen.

Houthi further stressed that the retaliatory missile attacks against Saudi targets would be halted in case the Saudi-led military coalition ends its acts of aggression against the impoverished country.

“We will decide on our own about this,” he emphasized.

The Saudi regime — along with its allies — accuses Iran of arming Ansarullah movement against the kingdom. Tehran has invariably dismissed having ever armed the movement and any accusation of regional interference for that matter.

It was not the first time that Yemeni forces used drones in their retaliatory raids, but Tuesday’s drone raids, which hit deep inside the Saudi kingdom, was seen by analysts as a sign of a significant leap in the Yemeni army’s drone capabilities.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing the government of former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the Ansarullah movement.

Despite Riyadh's claims that it is bombing the positions of the Ansarullah fighters, Saudi bombers are flattening residential areas and civilian infrastructures. Weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals, as well as water and electricity plants, have been targeted, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands.

According to a December 2018 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, the Saudi-led war has claimed the lives of over 60,000 Yemenis since January 2016.

Save the Children, a charity, has reported that more than 84,700 children under the age of five may have starved to death in Yemen since the Saudi regime and a coalition of its allies launched the brutal war on the already-impoverished nation.

France, the United States, the Uinted Kingdom and some other Western countries have faced criticisms over arms sales to the Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose aggression against Yemen has affected 28 million people and caused what the United Nations calls “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world". According to the world body, Yemen is suffering from the most severe famine in more than 100 years.

A UN panel has compiled a detailed report of civilian casualties caused by the Saudi military and its allies during their war against Yemen, saying the Riyadh-led coalition has used precision-guided munitions in its raids on civilian targets.

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