Strategic sites in Saudi Arabia come under Yemeni army attack

In a statement released by the al-Masirah TV channel on Tuesday, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for Yemen’s Armed Forces, said a barrage of ballistic and winged missiles as well as drones were used in the operation.

The attack targeted the headquarters of the Saudi Defense Ministry and general intelligence agency as well as King Salman Air Base, among other military targets in the capital Riyadh and the southern regions of Najran and Jizan, he added.

Saree also stressed that the military operation came in response to the “unjust embargo and brutal aggression” against Yemen, vowing to conduct more such raids against the kingdom until the siege is lifted and its offensive comes to an end.

In a post on his Twitter account, Mohammed Abdulsalam, spokesman of the Houthi Ansarullah movement, warned the US-Saudi coalition to take the latest Yemeni operation seriously.

“Stopping the aggression and lifting the siege are a humanitarian and national goal for oppressed Yemeni people,” he wrote, echoing the Yemeni army spokesman.

The operation, he added, signals that the Yemeni army’s next moves will be “more severe.”
Earlier in the day, Saudi activists reported loud blasts north of the capital Riyadh.

The Saudi-led coalition has also claimed that the alliance “successfully intercepted and destroyed” a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh by the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which leads Yemen’s defense forces.

In a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki called the strike a “deliberate and systematic operation to target civilians and civilian objects."

A few hours earlier, Malki reported another attack by the Houthis targeting the southern parts of the kingdom, claiming the coalition had intercepted eight bomb-laden drones and three ballistic missiles.

The missiles were fired from Yemen’s northwestern Sa’dah Province toward the kingdom’s Najran and Jizan regions, he added.

Saudi Arabia and a coalition of its vassal states launched the war on Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall a Riyadh-backed former regime.

The coalition has, however, achieved none of its goals thanks to stiff resistance by the Ansarullah-led Yemeni army.

The Saudi military aggression, coupled with a naval blockade, has killed hundreds of thousands of people and plunged Yemen into what the UN says the world's worst humanitarian crisis.