Local Editor
The Emirati Foreign Ministry has summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires to protest what Abu Dhabi claims to be Tehran’s “provision of weapons” to Yemen’s Houthi fighters, an allegation the Islamic Republic has repeatedly dismissed as unfounded.
Abdul Rahim al-Awadi, the UAE assistant minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for legal affairs, handed the Iranian envoy a note of protest, the official Emirates News Agency reported on Thursday.
Awadi said that Iran’s alleged provision of arms to the Houthis violates United Nations Security Council resolutions, which prohibit arms supplies.
Iranian officials have not made any comment on the report so far.
The United Arab Emirates is a key Saudi ally in its deadly aggression against Yemen that was launched in March 2015 in a bid to reinstall the ex-Yemeni government and crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
The Houthis and the Yemeni army have been defending Yemen against the Saudi offensive.
The Riyadh regime and its regional and Western partners, including the US, have on numerous occasions accused Iran of shipping arms to Yemen. Tehran has strongly rejected the claims as baseless and unsubstantiated.
The anti-Iran accusations have surfaced again as the Saudi-led coalition and its mercenaries have been suffering major blows on the battleground against Yemen’s Houthi fighters and allied arm forces, who are defending the civilian population against Riyadh’s offensive.
Analysts say such allegations are meant to cover up the Saudi regime’s failure to achieve its goals of war.
The military aggression has destroyed much of Yemen's infrastructure. It has also claimed the lives of over 11,400 Yemenis, including women and children, according to the latest tally by a Yemeni monitoring group.
Britain and the US have largely contributed to the Saudi campaign by providing huge amounts of weapons and military training to Riyadh’s military.
Washington and London have turned a deaf ear to repeated calls by major international rights groups to drop their support to the deadly Saudi campaign.
Late last month, the US went as far as carrying out a series of ground and air raids against a village in the Yemeni province of Bayda, killing dozens of people, among them civilians.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
