Yemen stresses self-defense right as Saudi Arabia decries Aramco raid at UN

A general view shows the damage at a Saudi Aramco petroleum products distribution plant‎, which Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement says it targeted with a Quds-2 type winged missile, in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on November 24, 2020.

Yemen said its armed forces reserve the legitimate right to respond to any act of aggression by the Saudi-led military coalition, after Riyadh complained to the UN Security Council over a Yemeni missile attack on an Aramco petroleum products distribution plant in the kingdom’s port city of Jeddah.

“The Saudi regime, despite all its appeals for condemnation and attempts to portray itself as a victim, cannot escape the fact that it is an aggressor and abuses the rights of Yemeni people,” Mohammed Abdul-Salam, the spokesman of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, wrote in a Twitter post on Tuesday, according to Press TV.

“The whole world knows it was the Saudi regime which launched an aggression and siege [against Yemen], and is pressing ahead with them.”

“As long as the Saudi regime continues such behavior, it should only wait for a response and legitimate defense unless it puts an end to the aggression and lifts the blockade,” Abdul-Salam said.

Moreover, Ansarullah politburo member Ali al-Qahoum told Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen television news network on Tuesday evening that the Riyadh regime’s confusion over the missile strike on the Saudi Aramco plant in Jeddah is proof of growing capabilities of the Yemeni Armed Forces.

Qahoum noted that the next strikes by Yemeni Armed Forces will be even more painful.

Saudi UN Ambassador Abdallah al-Mouallimi wrote in a letter to the Security Council late on Monday that Yemeni forces were to blame for the missile attack on the Aramco petroleum plant in Jeddah earlier in the day.

He urged the 15-member body to stop what he described as a “threat” to global energy security, Yemen’s political process and regional security.

Saudi Arabia has acknowledged that the Yemeni attack targeted the “core of the global economy and its supply routes”, causing major damage to the Aramco distribution facility.

Sana’a said the raid was a response to the Riyadh-led war and siege of Yemen, and that it was “similar to what happened at Khurais and Abqaiq”, referring to the strikes on the two Saudi oil facilities in 2019 that halved the kingdom’s oil production and sent global oil prices soaring.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a military onslaught against Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of the former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah movement.

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 for over the past five years.

The Ansarullah movement, backed by Armed Forces, has been defending Yemen against the Saudi-led alliance, preventing the aggressors from fulfilling the objectives of the atrocious war.