Since the Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes against the Houthis, the war has claimed 9,000 lives, displaced about 2.4 million people and pushed the Arab world’s already impoverished country to the verge of starvation.
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The U.S. State Department and Pentagon Tuesday OKed a $1.2 billion sale of 153 Abrams tanks to Saudi Arabia Tuesday.
The conflict in Yemen is between Houthi rebels allied with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who led the country from 1990 to 2012, and forces loyal to the ousted president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Turns out: 20 of those tanks, made in America by General Dynamics Land Systems, are “battle damage replacements” for Saudi tanks lost in combat. The proposed sale won’t alter the “basic military balance in the region”, the United States agency said.
In April of this year, the Yemeni government and the Houthis entered into UN-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait aimed at resolving the conflict, in which more than 6,400 people have been killed and another 2.5 million forced to flee their homes.
The deadly military escalation came four days after the United Nations peace talks in Kuwait between Yemeni parties broke down.
The coalition intervened in March past year after Houthi rebels and allied forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh overran Sanaa on September 2014.
A man looks for survivors under the rubble of a food factory hit by Saudi-led air strikes in Sanaa, Yemen.
But an investigation conducted by coalition officials into claims that Saudi warplanes have directly targeted civilians found that the air strikes had been justified because the Iranian-backed rebels had been using civilian institutions, such as hospitals, as command posts to launch attacks against coalition forces and their allies.
It also states that “Saudi Arabia and its mostly Gulf Arab allies intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015 after the Houthi movement had pushed the Hadi administration into exile in Saudi Arabia”.
The bombing came after Saudi-led coalition spokesman General Ahmed Asiri announced that the airstrikes against Shiite Houthi militia had resumed and led to the closure of Sanaa airport, saying fighter jets had hit military targets “around” the city, according to AFP.
Factory director Abdullah al-Aqel gave a higher toll of 16 killed and 10 wounded, adding that all the victims were workers.
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Both sides have stepped up fighting in recent days, with at least nine civilians killed as a result of coalition airstrikes in an eastern area of Sana’a at the weekend.
