Saudi Arabia has been the world’s largest arms importer over the past five years and has boosted by 130 percent its major arms imports, a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows.
The results of the study, published on Monday, also showed that the Riyadh regime accounted for 12 percent of global arms imports during the period from 2015 to 2019.
"Arms imports by countries in the Middle East increased by 61 percent between 2010–14 and 2015–19, and accounted for 35 percent of total global arms imports over the past five years. Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest arms importer in 2015–19. Its imports of major arms increased by 130 percent compared with the previous five-year period and it accounted for 12 percent of global arms imports in 2015–19," the report said.
SIPRI added that despite continuation of the Saudi military aggression against its southern neighbor, "...both the USA and the UK continued to export arms to Saudi Arabia in 2015–19."
“A total of 73 percent of Saudi Arabia’s arms imports came from the USA and 13 percent from the UK,” the report added.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, with the help of a number of its allies, particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), launched the brutal campaign against Yemen, whose former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi had fled to Riyadh a few months earlier after stepping down the previous year.
The Saudi-led campaign, code-named Operation Decisive Storm, was launched to achieve two main objectives: bringing Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, back to power, and crushing the Ansarullah movement, whose fighters have proved to be of significant help to the Yemeni army in defending the Arab country against the invaders since the onset of the imposed war.
The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives over the past nearly five years.
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