Riyadh responded to Washington calls for a ceasefire in its war on Yemen with a heavy bombing of Sana'a with more than 30 airstrikes on Friday, targeting al-Dulaimi Air Base in the capital and the surrounding areas, Al-Masirah TV reported.
“Coalition aircraft targeted legitimate military positions at al-Dulaimi Air Base, Northeast of the capital, Sana'a,” the coalition leadership said in a statement, referring to the outskirts of Yemen’s civilian international airport which remains one of the few lifelines for the war-torn country.
Colonel Turki al-Malki, the alliance's spokesman, claimed that the coalition has targeted the launch sites of ballistic missiles and drones.
Witnesses in port city of Hudaydah also said fighting was heard in areas near the airport and the university and Apache helicopters were spotted in the sky, after Saudi Arabia and the UAE massed thousands of additional troops near the city. They added that airstrikes were intensified on Thursday night on Ansarullah bases near the Eastern entrance to the port city.
Earlier, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Washington had been watching the conflict “for long enough”, and that he believed Saudi Arabia and the UAE were ready for talks.
“We have got to move toward a peace effort here, and we can’t say we are going to do it sometime in the future,” he stated, adding that “we need to be doing this in the next 30 days”.
Mattis’ call was later echoed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who urged the coalition to stop airstrikes in Yemen’s populated areas, saying the “time is now for the cessation of hostilities”.
The Ansarullah has expressed readiness for peace talks but strongly opposed the United States proposal for mediation in the conflict, holding Washington responsible for the aggression against Yemen. The movement believes that the only solution to the crisis lies in intra-Yemeni talks and non-interference by foreign parties.
Saudi Arabia has been striking Yemen since March 2015 to restore power to fugitive president Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh. The Saudi-led aggression has so far killed more than 17,500 Yemenis, including hundreds of women and children. Despite Riyadh's claims that it is bombing the positions of the Ansarullah fighters, Saudi bombers are flattening residential areas and civilian infrastructures.
Yemen is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis with more than 22 million people in need and is seeing a spike in needs, fuelled by ongoing conflict, a collapsing economy and diminished social services and livelihoods. The blockade on Yemen has smothered humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine to the import-dependent state.
The United Nations humanitarian chief has recently warned that Yemen is on the verge of widespread famine, with about half of the population completely relying on humanitarian aid for survival.
Numerous UN and rights groups have repeatedly pointed at grave human rights violations happening as a result of the Saudi onslaught.
Also, according to a report, Saudi Arabia deliberately impaired Yemen’s food supply by systematically targeting the war-torn country’s fishing installations, fishermen, agricultural sites and other food related infrastructure.
The revealing report, named “Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War”, has been recently published by the Tufts University affiliated World Peace Foundation after conducting a comprehensive review of data received from several organizations within the country.
The study underlines an extensive Saudi Coalition campaign to combine “economic war” with “physical destruction to create a mass failure in basic livelihoods”, highlighting what it describes as a clear war crime based on the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I.
“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sana’a,” the report noted.
Furthermore, the study ultimately challenged the legality of the Coalition’s operations, urging other United Nations Security Council member states to step in and halt the blatant “war crimes”.
A UN panel has also 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.