Women, children killed as Saudi jets bomb mosque in Yemen

Saudi warplanes have bombed a mosque in Amran province in western Yemen, killing seven people, including children and women.

Yemen’s al-Masirah TV reported that the victims lost their lives in an airstrike early on Monday. They were from the same family and had taken refuge in the mosque in order to avoid Saudi attacks.

Earlier reports said five civilians were killed and two others went missing after the attack. But the death toll rose after the bodies of two children were recovered from the rubble of the targeted mosque.

According to the report, the Saudi warplanes have carried out 11 airstrikes on the province over the past hours.

The attacks come despite a call by Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement for cessation of strikes.

A Houthi official on Friday said the movement would stop targeting Saudi territories with drones and ballistic missiles, hoping Riyadh would reciprocate the gesture.

President of the Supreme Political Council in the Yemeni capital Mahdi al-Mashat, however, warned that the Yemenis “would not hesitate to launch a period of great pain” if their call for peace were ignored.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia launched a military operation against the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah in violation of a 2018 UN-brokered ceasefire agreement after the heart of the kingdom’s oil industry came under a brazen attack.

It less than a week after the Yemeni forces launched retaliatory drone attacks on two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility.

Attacks by 10 Yemeni drones on the key oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais on September 14 shut down about 50 percent of the kingdom’s crude and gas production, cutting the state oil giant’s crude oil supply by around 5.7 million barrels per day.

Saudi Arabia said Friday it had launched a military operation against Hudaydah because the port city was being used by Yemeni fighters to launch ballistic missiles and drones.

Commenting on the Saudi attacks, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a post on his Twitter account it was “curious” that the Saudis, who had blamed Iran for the air raids, had retaliated against Hudaydah in violation of a UN truce.

“It is clear that even the Saudis themselves don’t believe the fiction of Iranian involvement,” he said.

Tehran has dismissed the allegations as sheer deceit and part of a new US and Saudi strategy of dealing with their failures.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing a former regime back to power.

The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 91,000 over the past four and a half years.

 

The war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The UN says over 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger.