U.S, EU bark about stopping war against Yemen worse than their bite

Y.A

By:Yousra Abdulmalik

New footage provided by Yemen’s War Media outlet shows Yemenis fighting back a Saudi push against the port city of Hudaydah , meantime the international calls to stop the war ignored by the Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US.

The Military Media published, on Saturday, special scenes of the coalition losses in AlMandhar village on West Coast. The scenes showed targeting gatherings of the coalition’s paid fighters with artillery shells, causing direct casualties, and destroying gathering of machinery with bombs, killing and injuring a number of the paid fighters.

The scenes also showed burning a number of the coalition’s equipment, including Emirati armored, and seizing arms and supplies were in the damaged machinery.

In addition, the Yemeni army forces killed five of Sudanese paid fighters through targeting two military trucks.50 paid fighters were killed in encountering a creep of them in Attohayta, and a number of paid fighters were killed by explosive device in 50 Street, in Hodiedah.

EU and European countries approved the sale of more than $86.7bn in arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to figures compiled by Middle East Eye.

The Republican majority in Congress managed on Wednesday to block a Democrat-sponsored resolution to end Washington’s support for Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen by advancing a bill to remove gray wolves from the protected species list.

The Netherlands has announced its intention to defend a ban on arms exports to Saudi Arabia in the UN Security Council.

Dutch Foreign Secretary Stef Blok made the announcement in a speech at the House of Representatives of the Netherlands on Thursday, in which he discussed a law which had been passed to ban arms exports to Riyadh against the backdrop of the war in Yemen.

Earlier on Thursday, the European Parliament renewed its call for further restrictions on the European Union (EU)’s arms exports to Saudi Arabia against the backdrop of the war in Yemen and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

However,Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates deployed about 10,000 new troops to Yemen’s west coast this month after their repeated campaigns to seize Hudaydah were thwarted.

Last week, Saudi Arabia announced a pause in the offensive, which a Houthi spokesman described a bid to buy time and reinforce the military strength for a fresh push.

“It was just like tickling a ghost.” That is a remark expressed with desperation by Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program David Beasley following his return from a three-day visit to Yemen, where he saw for himself the suffering of Yemeni children.

The ICRC’s regional director for the Near East and the Middle East, Fabrizio Carboni, stressed that reaching a political solution in Yemen is an urgent requirement, stressing the need to stop targeting civilians and infrastructure and to facilitate humanitarian tasks.

The US-Saudi-led coalition  launched an offensive on Hudaydah on 12 June in the largest battle of the war that the United Nations fears risks triggering a famine in Yemen where an estimated 8.4 million people are on the verge of starvation. Recently, It has been paused for peace talks, but no deal has been struck leaving Yemenis pessimistic over a viable political process.

Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi(Ansarallah)  movement, which is the main force that faces the coallition, said on a TV speech ,” The decision of invading the Yemeni ,western coast, has been taken and adopted by the United States of America,noting that the Saudis are trying to abolish Yemen’s freedom,” stressing that it was the people of Yemen’s right to defend their country.

The Bab el-Mandab Strait, which is the southern entrance to the Red Sea, is one of the world’s key shipping lanes for crude oil and allows crude exports into the European market.

In March 2015, the US -backed –Saudi-led coalition started  a war against Yemen with the declared aim of crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement, who had taken over from the staunch Riyadh ally and fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, while also seeking to secure the Saudi border with its southern neighbor. Three years and over 60,000 dead and injured Yemeni people and  prevented the patients from travelling abroad for treatment and blocked the entry of medicine into the war-torn country, the war has yielded little to that effect.