Yemeni forces destroy Saudi Apache choppers: Report

The Yemeni army and popular committees have reportedly destroyed two Saudi Arabian Apache helicopters in Yemen’s east-central province of Ma’rib.

The choppers were targeted with Tochka rockets in an operation, which also destroyed three Saudi missile launch platforms, Yemen’s al-Masirah TV reported on Friday.

A large number of Saudi, Emirati, and Bahraini forces were killed and injured in the retaliatory attack, which was undertaken as part of efforts to clear the province of al-Qaeda militants and Saudi-backed militants.

The UAE later confirmed that 22 of its soldiers had been killed in Yemen without specifying the circumstances of their deaths.

Missiles fired from the direction of Yemen also struck the Saudi military’s Hashed monitoring site and Saudi artillery positions in the Hamdan military site, both located in the Najran region of southwestern Saudi Arabia.

Saudi army gatherings in the Jizan region, similarly located in the kingdom’s southwest, also came under Yemeni missile fire.

Also on Friday, it was reported that several people had been killed in five Saudi airstrikes on a hospital in the Razih district of Sa’ada Province in northwestern Yemen.

Saudi fighter jets, meanwhile, launched more than 15 airstrikes on the Harad district in the southwestern Yemeni province of Hajjah, while at least eight air raids were carried out against the Yemeni capital, Sana’a.

On March 26, Saudi Arabia began its aggression against Yemen – without a UN mandate – in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to Yemen’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.

The conflict has so far left about 4,500 people dead and thousands of others wounded, the UN says. Local Yemeni sources, however, say the fatality figure is much higher.

The United Nations has repeatedly voiced concern over the rising number of civilian casualties in the Saudi military aggression against the impoverished Arab country.