Araweelo News Network
This file photo shows a domestically manufactured OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missile in Yemen. (Photo by the media bureau of Yemen’s Joint Operations Command)
Hudaydah(ANN)-At least a dozen pro-Saudi militiamen loyal to resigned Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi have been killed and several others injured when Yemeni army forces launched a tactical ballistic missile at their position in the country’s western coastal province of Hudaydah.
An unnamed Yemeni military source said army troopers, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, fired an OTR-21 Tochka missile at the Saudi mercenaries some 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Hudaydah on Friday afternoon, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.
The source added that panic swept through the Saudi-sponsored militiamen after the missile strike, stressing that the attack was carried out after reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles had gathered precise information.
Later on Friday, Yemeni soldiers and Popular Committees fighters lobbed a number of artillery rounds at a military site in the kingdom’s southern border region of Najran.
This file photo shows a domestically manufactured OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missile in Yemen. (Photo by the media bureau of Yemen’s Joint Operations Command)
The projectiles hit al-Shorfa base, located more than 844 kilometers south of the Saudi capital Riyadh, leaving scores of Saudi soldiers and mercenaries dead and injured.
The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the Saudi-led war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured since March 2015.
The United Nations says a record 22.2 million Yemenis 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 was a growing risk of famine and cholera there.
A Yemeni man inspects the damage caused by a Saudi airstrike on a cholera treatment center supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the Abs region of Yemen on June 11, 2018. (Photo by AFP)
“People’s lives have continued unraveling. Conflict has escalated since November driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes,” John Ging, UN director of aid operations, told the UN Security Council on February 27.
Ging said cholera had infected 1.1 million people in Yemen since last April, and a new outbreak of diphtheria had occurred in the war-ravaged Arab country since 1982.