Yemeni Foreign Minister in the National Salvation Government Hisham Sharaf Abdullah says authorities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia should not count on promises of military support from their foreign allies, advising them to take sensible decisions to stop Yemen from turning into their nightmare.
“Emirati and Saudi officials should not be deceived by pledges of military support from outsiders. They must rather work towards promotion of peace and establishment of cordial ties, stop daydreaming they can advance their own political agendas in Yemen and avoid supporting the clique of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who are the main beneficiaries of the ongoing Yemen conflict,” Abdullah said.
The senior Yemeni diplomat also lambasted latest remarks by the UAE’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, stating that her comments are meant to prevent an international investigation that will hold Abu Dhabi responsible for last week’s deadly airstrike against a temporary detention center in Yemen’s northwestern province of Sa’ada, which claimed the lives of at least 90 people and left many more injured.
Nusseibeh told CNN television news network on Tuesday that the UAE’s missile systems are “world-class.”
“There can always be upgrades, improvements and intelligence cooperation and these are the fields we’re looking at with our partners in the US,” she said.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia and other regional allies have been rallying support for Washington to re-list the Yemeni Ansarullah resistance group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
“That means listing them again on sanctions regimes … potentially listing additional figures, it means stopping the illicit flow of weapons and finance to them,” Nusseibeh said.
Abdullah went on to say that the UAE is involved in a meaningless military campaign against Yemen, stating that Emirati rulers are under the illusion that they would be able to assert control over Yemeni territories and financial resources at last.
He stressed that Yemeni army troops and fighters from their allied Popular Committees avoided targeting the UAE after the Persian Gulf country announced it was disengaging from the Saudi-led war on Yemen.
“But then again, the UAE showed it was still part of the Saudi-led coalition of aggression and deeply enmeshed in the conflict. The approach prompted Yemeni forces to take proper actions,” Abdullah said.
He emphasized that Yemeni armed forces are entitled to use all their military capabilities to defend their nation against any source of threat.
Speaking at a press conference in the capital Sana’a on Monday, spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree stated that Yemeni troops and their allies had hit al- Dhafra Air Base, located approximately 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of Abu Dhabi, as well as other designated sites on the outskirts of the Emirati capital with barrages of Zulfiqar ballistic missiles during Operation Yemen Hurricane II.
Saree noted that important targets in Dubai were struck with indigenous long-endurance Sammad-3 (Invincible-3) unmanned aerial vehicles.
The senior military official added that Yemeni armed forces also used squadrons of Sammad-1 and Qasef-2K (Striker-2K) combat drones to hit a number of military camps in the Sharurah town of Saudi Arabia’s southern region of Najran.
“Additionally, a number of vital targets and strategic sites in [the kingdom’s] Jizan and ‘Asir regions were targeted with several ballistic missiles,” Saree said, emphasizing that the designated locations were hit with high precision.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing Hadi’s government back to power and crushing Ansarullah 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.
Despite heavily-armed Saudi Arabia’s incessant bombardment of the impoverished country, the Yemeni armed forces and the Popular Committees have grown steadily in u against the Saudi-led invaders and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.