Yemeni forces have launched fresh drone attacks on an airport in Saudi Arabia’s southern province of Najran, retaliating strikes by an invading Saudi-led coalition.
The al-Masirah TV channel reported that the Air Force of the Yemeni Army and allied fighters from Popular Committees had used Qasif-K2 combat drones for the Sunday operation.
It quoted Yemen’s military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Sare’e as saying that the strikes first targeted control and command rooms for Saudi unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at the Najran airport and later drone hangers and military sites.
He said the drones had successfully hit their targets and halted air traffic at the Najran airport.
The Saudi-led coalition, he added, has conducted 27 airstrikes on Yemen over the past 48 hours.
Yemeni forces regularly target positions inside Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, which began in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall a former regime and eliminate the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which has been defending the country along with the armed forces.
The Western-backed military aggression, coupled with a naval blockade, has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis, destroyed the country’s infrastructure, and led to a massive humanitarian crisis.
The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the Saudi-led war has claimed the lives of over 60,000 Yemenis since January 2016.