Shamkhani Laments UN Inaction on Foreign Invasion of Yemen
Local Editor
The Secretary General of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, chided the United Nations [UN] on Tuesday for its muted response to foreign military attacks on Yemen that have wreaked havoc on the impoverished country.
"The United Nation’s lack of serious reaction to the foreign interference in Yemen and military offensive against that country without a mandate... is not acceptable," Shamkhani said in a meeting with Deputy Secretary-General of the UN, Jan Kenneth Eliasson, in Iran’s capital of Tehran on Tuesday.
He also voiced concern that the Saudi-led military aggression against Yemen has destroyed the country’s infrastructures and has jeopardized human life there.
For his part, Eliasson deplored the turbulent political situation in the Middle East region, saying the crises in Yemen, Syria and Iraq have caused great pains and instability.
He noted that given the growing threat of the proxy wars, efforts should be made to settle the disputes peacefully after putting an immediate end to the conflicts.
On March 26, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies backed by the United States began to launch a military aggression against Yemen by launching air strikes against the country in an attempt to restore power to the fugitive former Yemeni President, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Saudi Arabia.
The airstrikes have not been authorized by the UN.
The ’civilian’ death toll in Yemen has risen to more than 2,300 with more than 4,000 other civilians wounded in the fighting in the country that has raged for more than a year now, according to the UN recently last month [September]. Yet, other organizations put the death toll at much higher.
More than 4,000 Yemenis, many of them children and women, have been killed in the aggression against the Arab country so far.
