Yemeni army soldiers, backed by fighters from allied Popular Committees, have shot dead three Saudi soldiers in the kingdom’s southwestern border region of Jizan, in retaliation for the Riyadh regime’s military campaign against the crisis-hit country.
An unnamed military source told Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that Yemeni forces and their allies shot and killed the soldiers in al-Ghawi village as well as al-Shabakeh and al-Dokhan military camps in the region, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, on Friday evening.
Earlier in the day, Yemeni snipers fatally shot nine Saudi-sponsored militiamen loyal to Yemen's resigned president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi across Yemen.
Local sources, requesting anonymity, said four Saudi mercenaries were killed in the Sirwah district of Yemen's central province of Ma'rib, while three others were shot and killed in the Nihm district of the western-central Yemeni province of Sana'a.
Yemeni army soldiers and Popular Committees fighters also killed two Saudi-backed militiamen in the Khabb wa ash Sha'af district of al-Jawf province.
Furthermore, Yemeni forces fired a solid propellant Zelzal-2 (Earthquake-2) missile at a position of Saudi mercenaries in the Mawza district of Yemen's southern province of Ta'izz, leaving scores of them dead and injured.
At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in 2015. Much of the country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.
The Saudi-led war has also triggered a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.
According to the World Health Organization’s latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April 2017 and is suspected to have infected 841,906.
In November 2017, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, said more than 11 million children in Yemen were in acute need of aid, stressing that it was estimated that every 10 minutes a child died of a preventable disease there.
Additionally, the UN has described the current level of hunger in Yemen as “unprecedented,” emphasizing that 17 million people were food insecure in the country.
The world body says that 6.8 million, meaning almost one in four people, do not have enough food and rely entirely on external assistance.