Yemeni army soldiers, backed by fighters from allied Popular Committees, have shot dead four Saudi troopers in the kingdom’s southwestern border regions of Jizan and Najran, in retaliation for the Riyadh regime’s military campaign against the crisis-hit country.
A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that Yemeni forces shot and killed three soldiers in Quwa villages of Jizan, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, on Tuesday afternoon.
Yemeni forces and their allies also targeted another Saudi trooper at al-Ashah base in the kingdom’s Najran region, located 844 kilometers (524 miles) south of Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime.
At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.
The United Nations says a record 22.2 million people are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.
A high-ranking UN aid official recently warned against the “catastrophic” living conditions in Yemen, stating that there is a growing risk of famine and cholera there.
“After three years of conflict, conditions in Yemen are catastrophic,” John Ging, UN director of aid operations, told the UN Security Council on February 27.
He added, “People's lives have continued unraveling. Conflict has escalated since November driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes.”
Ging further noted that cholera has infected 1.1 million people in Yemen since last April, and a new outbreak of diphtheria has occurred in the war-ravaged Arab country since 1982.