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Saudi Arabia enjoys US, Israel backing on Yemen atrocities: Expert

Thursday, 30 August 2018 6:34 AM [ Last Update: Thursday, 30 August 2018 6:38 AM ]

Yemenis gather next to a destroyed bus at the site of a Saudi air strike in the province of Sa’ada on August 10, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

The United Nations is incapable of pressuring Saudi Arabia to end its military aggression on Yemen as the kingdom has the the support from the United States and Israel, says an analyst.

“The UN is more or less being dragged into this, telling a little bit of truth about the horrific massacres that have been going on in Yemen," Kevin Barrett, American scholar and author, told Press TV in an interview on Thursday. "This country has essentially been decimated by Saudi bombing of civilian infrastructure designed to punish the population for essentially wanting to stay independent.”

“This war is really a war of Saudi conquest … and gradually the world is being forced to face the fact that the Saudis made a huge mistake, that the suffering has just gone off the charts, people of Yemen are facing a situation that is actually going beyond what we have seen in a lot of other humanitarian crisis areas,” Barrett said.

“So the UN is perhaps going to call for some kind of relief, to call for increase and so on, but whether this will actually pressure the Saudis to end their war on Yemen is another story because the Saudis seem to have the support of the [US President Donald] Trump administration … and of course the Saudis are also very close to the Israeli leadership and so this mafia is still able to hold off international pressure and essentially do what it wants and I don’t think the UN and the countries of the world have enough courage to stand up to it,” he added.

United Nations human rights experts have raised the alarm at the high rate of civilian casualties in aerial assaults by Saudi Arabia and its allies against Yemen, saying the strikes “may amount to war crimes.”

In a 41-page report published on Tuesday, the Group of International and Regional Eminent Experts on Yemen raised “serious concerns about the targeting process applied by the [Saudi-led] coalition.”

The Saudi-led coalition has denounced the UN report as “inaccurate and biased”, saying it has misconstrued the facts of the conflict.

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