BY DAVID WILLIAM PEAR
Source: AHTribune
On October 31st the US Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis and the US Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo called for a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement to the war against Yemen. This was more than an obvious publicity stunt. Was it a cruel Halloween prank?

It is the US that is leading from behind the Saudi and other Gulf Cooperative Council countries’ war against Yemen. The GCC front countries for the US are the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. The KSA and Qatar are embroiled in a feud. Oman has opted out of the war for now. Non-GCC countries Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia are also contributing to the massacre of the people of Yemen.

The US has recruited the usual suspects of non-state actors, Blackwater mercenaries (rebranded Academi), Daesh, and al Qaeda to terrorize Yemenis on the ground, while Saudi pilots pound them with 2000-pound bombs. The Saudi coalition pilots purposely target school buses, villages, markets and hospitals with precision-guided bombs.

The United Nations [its mission and impartiality weakened and hollowed out by decades of attacks and manipulation by the United States and its accomplices] is now just a US lapdog that gives the US and Saudi coalition a fig leaf of legality for the genocide in Yemen. The UN has authorized a one-sided arms embargo against Yemen, which the US and Saudis have turned into a total blockade of food, water, and humanitarian supplies. The blockade is keeping vital supplies from the Yemeni civilians, which are desperately needed by them to sustain life.

The UN continues the façade that the “internationally recognized legitimate government” of Yemen is Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. His term as an interim president in Yemen expired in 2014. He illegally extended his term for one year, and then he was driven out of office by the Yemeni people. The people had had enough of Hadi’s corruption, catering to the International Monetary Fund, austerity and the privatization of state enterprises at fire sale prices.

In a Houthi-led uprising, the people of Yemen forced Hadi out of office. Hadi resigned as president and then fled from the capital city of Sana’a and went to the southern port city of Aden. In Aden Hadi rescinded his resignation and tried to reconstitute his moribund government. When that failed, he fled to Riyad, Saudi Arabia.

With the US and Saudi backing, Hadi makes the claim from the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton Hotel that he is the legitimate government of Yemen. He has no portfolio with which to govern, and it is rumored that MBS is holding him prisoner in the Ritz-Carlton. Regardless of the rumor, he is still just a Saudi tool. The de facto government of Yemen is the Houthi-led movement’s leaders, which are supported by the people and the security forces of Yemen.

The US blames the war on Iran which has not invaded another country in over 200 years. The US does not have a shred of evidence that Iran is backing the Houthi movement. Yet the mainstream media constantly regurgitates whatever the US government’s warmongers feed them to say.

The Houthis in Yemen are the Zaydi Shia sect, which is similar to Sunni Islam. For centuries the Zaydi Shia and Sunnis have lived in peace and even pray together in Yemen’s mosques. Simplistic Western propaganda has tried to fabricate that the war in Yemen is a Sunni vs. Shia war, with the Houthis being backed by Shia Iran.

The Zaydi Shia in Yemen are a very different sect of Shia than the Iran Twelvers. (Western journalists are too lazy to look it up in Wikipedia). So, the US government dominated mainstream media never fails to repeat the propaganda that the Houthis are “Iran-backed”. Iran is the imaginary boogeyman that the US has invented.

The real Halloween boogeyman who is killing hundreds of thousands of Yemenis is the US-backed Saudi boogeyman Mohammed bin Salman. He is known affectionately as MBS, by his drooling admirer Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. MBS is a blood-drenched madman. He chops off the heads of his critics, dismembers their bodies with bone saws, stones women for adultery, and crucifies victims just for the fun of it.

The US turns a blind eye from this bloody madman because he buys billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons. Then MBS uses US weapons to kill innocent civilians in Yemen. Friedman says MBS is a liberal reformer in Saudi Arabia because MBS lets women drive cars (as long as they get their husband’s permission first).

There would be no war against Yemen had the US-led Saudi coalition not first attacked that country from the air, land and sea. Tens of thousands of people, most of them children would not have died, there would not be the worst cholera epidemic in history and 20 million people would not be suffering from a man-made famine, had the US-backed Saudis not invaded Yemen. It was the Obama administration that gave the Saudis the nod, wink and the military support for its war of aggression against Yemen. Yemen had not attacked or threatened anybody.

It was the US-led Saudi coalition that started the war in 2015. It was code named Operation Decisive Storm. Like most US-backed wars it was not decisive.

Operation Decisive Storm was supposed to be a short war, a cakewalk as the military likes to say. As we have seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, these cakewalks turn into never-ending wars that turn into quagmires, they kill hundreds of thousands of people and they leave millions of people in dire distress.

Three years later in 2018, the US-led coalition is still bombing, blockading, starving civilians and purposely causing the spread of the worst cholera epidemic in history. It is another US dirty war similar to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. As with the US-imposed blockade of Iraq in the 1990’s, a million children will die of cholera because of the destruction of the water purification works and the blockade of replacement parts and potable water.

Mattis’s and Pompeo’s Halloween announcement made it clear that they were not serious. Their announcements were just a Halloween prank to try to garner some good publicity after the tarnishing the US took from MBS’s butchering of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. That murder, which is not out of character for MBS, just happened to present a temporary public relations problem for the US, as well as for the Saudis.

The ugly publicity against MBS spewed over onto the US. The US came under scathing criticism from the US public for being allied with the Saudi gangster regime. The US-Saudi relationship has cast a bright light on the true nature of American values. They are denominated in power and dollars.

Mattis’s and Pompeo’s Halloween prank was an attempt to try and distance the US in the public’s mind from Saudi Arabia. They were not making a sincere peace initiative. It was all about political jockeying, hoping that the ugly Khashoggi murder would blow over. Anybody that has been following US foreign wars knows that the US and the Saudis are together in them. They both have blood up to their eyeballs.

The Mattis and Pompeo Halloween duet was a freak show. They tried to talk like tough peacemakers. They told the Yemen War that it had 30 days to “get out of Dodge”. Mattis demanded that everybody had to sit around the peace table in Sweden. The way the US tells it, whoever the US enemy du jour is always refuses to talk peace. We just went through a similar farce about North Korea supposedly refusing to sit at the negotiation table. Actually, it is always the US that refuses to negotiate unless its demands of preconditions are met first.

The US preconditions for Yemen is that it has to surrender. It has to stop resisting the US-led invasion. In return, the US made the “generous” offer of not bombing civilian targets. Only then will the US be willing to dictate the terms.

Mattis demanded that Yemen surrender or else the US-led Saudis are going to bomb more school buses, fish markets, hospitals, funerals, weddings, and civilian infrastructure. Those are war crimes. Mattis and Pompeo are hostage taking war criminals. They are threatening to kill more children that they are holding hostage, unless Yemen bows to US terms:

“Thirty days from now we want to see everybody around a peace table based on a ceasefire, based on a pullback from the border and then based on ceasing dropping of bombs (on civilian areas) that will permit the (UN) special envoy, Martin Griffiths — he’s very good, he knows what he’s doing — to get them together in Sweden and end this war.” Mattis should have added “Trick or Treat”.

Surrender first is the US version of negotiating. The US is holding Yemeni civilians hostage. By offering to not bomb civilian targets, the US is admitting that it has been leading the Saudi bombing of civilians on purpose. The US-led Saudi coalition has dropped over 15,000 2000-pound bombs on Yemen. Yet for three years the UN has insisted that (only) 10,000 civilians have been killed.

The actual number is in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The siege warfare and biological warfare of starvation and cholera have taking tens of thousands of lives as well. Most of those killed have been children. Someone should check with Madeleine Albright to find out if she thinks it has been “worth it”. She is another Halloween ghoul that thinks that killing children is a good thing.

Yemen is another US dirty war. The US is using the same subterfuge and dirty tricks that it uses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The US and its co-conspirators Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries have been bombing Yemen and invading it with terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, Daesh and Blackwater mercenaries from South America.

It is the US-led Saudi coalition that started the war. If Mattis and Pompeo want to end it all they must do is to stop bombing and attacking Yemen. Open the ports and let the humanitarian aid flow in. Stop funding Daesh and mercenaries in Yemen. It really would be that easy. Yemen is not attacking Saudi Arabia or anybody else. They are only firing their feeble rockets into Saudi Arabia in defiance.

Here is some background on the war: See my article The US-Led Genocide and Destruction of Yemen. There was a popular uprising led by the Houthi Movement in 2011 that deposed the 33-year dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh. The United Nations then facilitated negotiations for an interim government until national elections could be held. A nationwide referendum was held on the UN peace plan in 2012. Only one name was on the ballot for the interim president. It was the name of the US and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia backed Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. Not surprisingly he got 100% of the votes cast. His term in office was 2 years.

Instead of helping to form a unity government and prepare for elections in 2014, Hadi went on an International Monetary Fund imposed austerity program and a rapid privatization program. He went on a spree of an unauthorized massive sell-off of state-owned enterprises at fire sale prices. The purchasers were outside the Gulf States and US buyers. In 2014 Hadi illegally extended his presidency for another year, saying he needed more time. He increased the austerity program on Yemenis and intensified the privatizations.

The people of Yemen said they had enough of Hadi. Under the leadership of the Northern group known as Houthis there were massive demonstrations in the capital city of Sana’a and demands for Hadi’s resignation. Hadi resigned and fled the capital city of Sana’a. He went to the Southern port city of Aden, rescinded his resignation, and tried to reconstitute his failed government. Failing that, he fled to Saudi Arabia.

The US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the United Nations continue the hoax that Hadi is the “internationally recognized legitimate government” of Yemen. Based on that hoax, the US backs the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which are led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The GCC formed a military coalition with US support to restore Hadi to power in Yemen by force. The US, which has been covertly involved in Yemen for decades, raised the issue that the US’s national security is threatened in Yemen. The US claim is that the Houthis have caused conditions for the growth of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). How convenient that the US finds terrorists under every rock. It is the US that has been putting them there.

The US’s real concern is that a new government in Yemen will not be compliant to Western neoliberalism and IMF imposed austerity and privatization. The Saudi’s are worried that a Houthi-led government in Yemen would not be under its oppressive thumb. Together the UN, the US, the KSA and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries declared Hadi as the “internationally recognized legitimate government” of Yemen. Functioning out of a Riyadh five-star hotel, Hadi supposedly asked for the US-led Saudi coalition to aid him in restoring himself to power, in what he calls a civil war.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE claim that they are coming to the aid of the “internationally recognized legitimate government” of Yemen. (Notice that the Western mainstream media always uses that exact phrasing to describe Hadi). The United Nations imposed a one-sided arms embargo on Yemen, which is actually a blockade. All of this happened with a wink, a node and a push from President Obama in 2015.

With US logistical support, Saudi Arabia launched an air assault on Yemen in 2015 codenamed Operation Decisive Storm. When that failed the US-led Saudis appropriately renamed it Operation Restoring Hope. The US-led Saudis intensified their attacks on the civilian population, destroyed their water works and sanitation facilities, which has predictably caused an outbreak of cholera.

The blockade of humanitarian supplies, food, potable water and needed repair parts has, again predictably, resulted in the worst cholera epidemic in history. It is germ warfare, which is the same as the US used in the 1990’s to kill hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq. [See: “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others” by the Association of Genocide Scholars.]

The US-led Saudi coalition is a genocidal aggression. It has put 20 million people at grave risk of starvation and disease. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have died at the hands of the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The people of Yemen do not have the 30 days that Mattis is taunting them with to begin a peace conference. In 30 days another 10,000 children or more will die of cholera, starvation and disease.

If the US was sincere in wanting peace, which it shows no real desire for, then it would put a stop to the bombing within 24 hours. All the US would have to do is to stop supporting the Saudis. Stop refueling their planes, stop providing them with bombs, stop the US logistics and stop supporting Daesh and the mercenaries that the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have infiltrated into Yemen. A halt to the war would not put the US, Saudi Arabia or the other GCC countries at any risk. Yemen is not threatening to attack anyone. All Yemen wants is to be left alone.

The blockade should be lifted immediately for humanitarian reasons. Lifting the blockade would allow desperately needed food, water, medical supplies and other essentials to enter the country. Lifting the blockade would save tens of thousands, maybe millions of lives.

With the bombing stopped, terrorists subdued, and the blockade lifted, then humanitarian organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross could safely rush in to provide life-saving treatment for the thousands of dying children.

Stopping the war in Yemen would not be complicated. It does not require a 30-day waiting period and months of negotiations by the UN’s “he’s very good, he knows what he is doing” Martin Griffiths. Mattis and Pompeo are not serious though. They are just toying with the millions of lives in Yemen. It was all a cruel Trick or Treat Halloween prank by “Mad Dog” Mattis and Pompeo.

Source: MWC News
UN warns of ‘incalculable human cost’ in Yemen’s Hodeidah

Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance as fighting in port city threatens food supply, says UN official.

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has worsened “dramatically” in the last week since UN-sponsored peace talks collapsed and fighting resumed in the port city of Hodeidah.

Lise Grande, UN humanitarian coordinator, said on Thursday that “hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance” in rebel-held Hodeidah, where “families are absolutely terrified by the bombardment, shelling and air strikes”.

The three-year war has unleashed the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis in the nation of 28 million people with 22 million dependent on aid.

The UN warned ongoing fighting in Hodeidah, the entry point for the bulk of Yemen’s commercial imports and aid supplies, could trigger famine in the impoverished nation where an estimated 8.4 million people are facing starvation.

“We’re particularly worried about the Red Sea mill, which currently has 45,000 metric tonnes of food inside, enough to feed 3.5 million people for a month. If the mills are damaged or disrupted, the human cost will be incalculable,” Grande said in a statement.

Battles rage

Yemeni forces, backed by a Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates-led coalition, seized the main road linking Hodeidah to the capital Sanaa, blocking a key supply route for the Houthi rebels in control of the country’s north.

“The main entrance in Hodeidah leading to Sanaa has been closed after forces backed by the UAE took control of the road,” a pro-coalition military source told the Reuters news agency.

Residents said the city’s main eastern gate had been damaged in air raids and fighting was continuing on secondary streets off the main road.

There was no immediate word from either side of the conflict on their casualties.

Doctors and medics in two hospitals in Hodeidah province told the Associated Press news agency that 50 people have been killed in the past 24 hours.

Hundreds of civilians have fled their homes in Hodeidah to escape the fighting and heavy smoke was rising above parts of the city, AP quoted officials as saying.

The fighting in Hodeidah intensified following the collapse of UN-sponsored talks in Geneva last week after the Houthi delegation failed to show up.

‘Living hell’

Coalition forces – which aim to restore the internationally recognised government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled Yemen after the Houthi takeover – believe their control over Hodeidah by cutting off supply lines would force the rebels to join the negotiating table.

Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy on Yemen, is expected to meet Houthi representatives as well as Yemeni government officials living in exile in Saudi Arabia this week in a bid to revive talks.

Meanwhile, Meritxell Relano, UNICEF’s representative in Yemen, said more than 11 million children faced food shortages, disease, displacement, and lack of access to basic services.

“The conflict has made Yemen a living hell for its children,” she said. “An estimated 1.8 million children are malnourished in the country. Nearly 400,000 of them are severely acute malnourished, and they are fighting for their lives every day.”

According to the UN, at least 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudi-Emirati-led coalition intervened in Yemen in 2015. The death toll, however, has not been updated in years and is likely to be much higher.

Source: Yemen Press
Charity organizations have called on the UN to blacklist the Saudi-led coalition over serious violations of children’s rights in Yemen as statistics reveal massive child fatalities caused by the ongoing war against the impoverished nation.

According to a joint report prepared by Save the Children and Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, the Saudi-led coalition committed “grave violations against children” in a series of 23 attacks on civilian sites, including hospitals and schools, in 2016, the Guardian reported on Thursday.

The campaigners urged the UN to highlight the crimes committed by the Saudi-led alliance, including massive killing and maiming of Yemeni children, in its annual report on child rights violations in conflict, expected to be released in August.

The annual UN report incorporates a blacklist of countries and groups that have committed violations such as killing or maiming children, recruiting children, abduction, sexual violence, or attacking schools or hospitals.

In 2016, Saudi Arabia forced the UN to omit the coalition’s name from the blacklist, after the annual report revealed that the coalition was responsible for 60 percent of child deaths and injuries in Yemen in 2015. The decision drew criticism from rights groups which accused the UN of succumbing to Riyadh’s political pressure.

According to some statistics, as a result of the Saudi-led war on Yemen, over 4,000 children have been killed or injured, while a further 2.2 million under five are acutely malnourished. Meanwhile, a growing cholera epidemic has also affected over 118,000 children.

In a single Saudi-led airstrike on a market in Mastaba district in February 2016, 25 children were killed. In October, the Saudi warplanes targeted a funeral in the capital city of Sana’a, killing 100 people and wounding 500, with the number of children killed unknown.

Save the Children warned that the UN will set a dangerous precedent for international conflicts if it does not include the Saudi-led coalition on this year’s list.

“If there is no accountability, if groups that are fighting think they can use their political influence – and if they are powerful enough and rich enough, then they can get away with killing and injuring children, or bombing schools and hospitals – it sets a really dangerous precedent not just for Yemen but for conflicts around the world,” said Caroline Anning, senior conflict and humanitarian advocacy adviser at Save the Children.

“[Children] are facing threats from all sides, they have got the threat of airstrikes from above, which are continuous – just in the past few weeks we have seen [bombs] landing on marketplaces where civilians have been killed,” she added.

“Huge numbers of children are on the brink of starvation. The airstrikes have contributed to the collapse of the health system, there are huge numbers of kids who cannot get any healthcare, there is a massive cholera epidemic spreading across the country, millions of children are out of schools,” Anning pointed out.

The charities argue that inclusion of Saudi Arabia on the UN’s blacklist would make it harder for the US and the UK to continue arms exports or diplomatic support for Riyadh.

Last week, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) lost a high-profile case calling for UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia to be stopped over humanitarian concerns about civilian death toll in Yemen, after a high court in London ruled that the arms exports to Riyadh could continue.

“The government may have won a legal victory but the moral case is clear: the Saudi-led coalition is killing children, and Britain is supplying Saudi Arabia with arms,” said George Graham, Save the Children’s director of humanitarian and conflict policy.

Saudi Arabia has been leading a destructive military campaign against Yemen since March 2015 to reinstate former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.

The campaign has seriously damaged the country’s infrastructure. Local Yemeni sources have put the death toll from the Saudi war at over 12,000, including many women and children.

The conflict has also left more than 17 million people in the country food-insecure, with some 6.8 million of them in need of immediate aid.

The destruction of Yemen’s health sector during the war has made it difficult to deal with the growing cholera epidemic in the country.

The UN has warned that suspected cholera cases across Yemen has surpassed 320,000 while at least 1,740 had lost their lives after being infected.

On July 12, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Stephen O’Brien blamed Yemen’s cholera crisis on the perpetrators and their foreign supporters of the ongoing war against the impoverished country.

The US and the UK have been the main purveyors of weapons, training and intelligence to Saudis during the course of the unprovoked war, which began in March 2015.

Source: PressTV
The leader of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement has warned that the US military is preparing the ground for an act of aggression against the war-torn Arab country.

In a televised speech on Thursday, Abdul Malik Badreddin al-Houthi slammed Washington’s recent missile attacks against three mobile radar sites on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, saying the nation and armed forces should stay vigilant and stand fully ready to face the invaders.

“The US is after laying the groundwork for making an invasive move against [western coastal] Hudaydah Province,” the statement said, adding, “Through this measure, the US is after building up pressure on and harassing the people of Yemen.”

“The Yemeni nation will defend its territory, freedom and independence, seeing it as its right to use any legitimate means against violent invasions,” the Houthi leader said.

He made the comments on the anniversary of the October 14, 1963 onset of an armed struggle, which forced the British into withdrawal from southern Yemen.

Lead-up

The US on Wednesday hit Yemen’s radar sites after claiming that the USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer, had come under the Yemeni attack for the second time in four days.

Yemeni officials have rejected the allegations as “unfounded” aimed at providing a pretext for the intelligence and logistics support which the US has provided to Saudi Arabia in its military campaign.

US accusations came in the wake of a Saudi aerial attack on a funeral which killed more than 140 people attending a wake for the father of Yemen’s interior minister in the capital Sana’a on Saturday.

Ansarullah on Thursday “expressed readiness to work with any United Nations or international body to investigate these allegations and to punish those behind this, regardless who they may be,” the Saba Net news agency reported.

Spokesman for Yemeni forces Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman denounced US missile strikes, saying Yemen reserves the right to defend itself in the face of such threats.

Pentagon on warpath

The Pentagon, however, said it was preparing for possible new strikes in Yemen.

“This is about protecting our people, period,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said even though he acknowledged that the US has yet to determine who was responsible for the alleged launch of missiles.

“We don’t know who was pulling the trigger,” but the missiles were launched from “Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen,” Cook claimed.

Many observers believe US allegations of Yemeni attacks on its warships are aimed at turning away attention from the Sana’a carnage and reducing pressure on Washington over its aid to the Saudis.

They say the Yemeni army and its allies are unlikely to have opted for opening a new front, which would only undermine their position in the battle against Saudi Arabia.

Washington, along with the UK, has been a major arms provider to Saudi Arabia, which has been at war against its southern neighbor since March 2015.

The US has supported the Saudi military and its allies with aerial refueling and targeting assistance during the war on Yemen.

Source: RT
Fighter jets from the Saudi-led coalition hit the Yemeni capital of Sanaa during a massive rally that attracted some 100,000 pro-Houthi rebels and sympathizers of ex-President Abdullah Saleh.

Tens of thousands of people rallied in Sanaa’s central square on Saturday in a powerful display of support for the Shiite Houthi rebels and Saleh. Demonstrators cheered a recently established Supreme Political Council that includes representatives of the Houthi movement, as well as supporters of Saleh.

The huge gathering also denounced Saleh’s successor, Mansur Hadi, who fled the country last year and is seeking reinstatement with military backing from Saudi Arabia.

During the demonstration, fighter jets bombed Yemen’s capital, including the area around the Presidential palace, according to AP. The bombardment resulted in an “unknown number of casualties,” the agency reports, quoting local officials. People on Twitter said that at least three civilians were killed and a number were wounded.

“Suddenly, they started bombing and the crowd started running. I basically bolted out of the area. People started screaming… Because everybody’s very well armed, they started shooting their AK-47s and their machine guns into the sky,” Hisham al-Omeisy said, as quoted by the BBC.

For its part, Saudi Arabia claimed earlier that a rocket had been launched at Narjan, a Saudi city, from Yemen, killing one person and injuring six others, ArabNews reports.

Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly slammed for causing civilian casualties during its bombing campaign. In the latest case on August 13, at least ten children were killed in an airstrike blamed on the Saudi-led coalition that hit a religious school in northwestern Yemen. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) confirmed that 28 youngsters were also injured in that attack. After Saudi jets hit their hospital, killing 19 people, MSF announced on Thursday that it was pulling its staff out of northern Yemen.

In January of this year, the UN condemned Riyadh for carrying out “widespread and systematic” assaults on civilian targets. “The panel documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations of international humanitarian law,” the UN stated.

Saudi Arabia, along with eight allies, began a military operation in Yemen in March of 2015 at request of Yemeni President Hadi, a Sunni, who fled the country after Shiite Houthi rebels seized the capital of Sanaa. The rebels recognize Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted earlier, as Yemen’s legitimate president.

A UN backed peace process to end the civil war has so far yielded little result. A Supreme Council recently established by the Houthis has been denounced by the government of President Hadi and Riyadh as well.

The latest round of peace talks between the Houthis and supporters of Hadi collapsed on August 6. The UN expected the sides to get back to the negotiating table in September, however that proposal was brushed aside by the rebels because the Saudis have since ramped up their airstrikes, AP reports.

Meanwhile, after a meeting between Russian special representative for the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, and Yemen’s deputy prime minister in Saudi Arabia, Abdulmalik Al-Mekhlafi, Moscow called on both sides to continue to seek a peaceful solution to the ongoing war.

“During the lengthy conversation, we discussed in detail the military, security, and humanitarian situation in Yemen, stressing the need for an urgent peace solution form the crisis in the country,” Bogdanov was quoted by TASS news agency as saying.