Tehran rejects report of military advisor killed in Yemen, says no Iranian advisors present in Arab country

Saeed Khatibzadeh added on Saturday that remarks by a member of the ousted government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in Sana’a that an Iranian citizen has been killed in Yemen are totally wrong.

“Such baseless statements will not change the realities on the ground in Yemen about the cowardly attacks of the self-proclaimed coalition against the oppressed people of Yemen and their determination to face the aggression,” the Iranian spokesperson pointed out.

Khatibzadeh expressed regret that those individuals who consider themselves Yemenis are now encouraging and backing the aggressors in their oppression caused by the blockade and war against people of their own country.

The spokesman’s remarks came after Muammar al-Iryani, Yemeni information minister in the administration of Hadi, claimed on Twitter that an Iranian military expert and nine other people were killed in a Saudi-led airstrike in central Yemen on Saturday, Anadolu news agency reported.

The war-torn country has been beset by violence and chaos since 2015, when Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a devastating military campaign to reinstall the Saudi-friendly regime of Hadi in Sana’a.

The protracted war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and created the worst humanitarian catastrophe in modern history.

The regime in Riyadh, facing multiple setbacks in the battlefield, has recently started recruiting Daesh and al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, who have faced stiff resistance from the Yemeni military, too.

In addition to Sa’da and al-Hudaydah, Saudi-backed mercenaries continue their destabilizing activities in other provinces like Ma’rib, about 120 kilometers east of Sana’a.

Over the past few months, the strategic province has been the scene of large-scale operations by Yemeni armed forces, strongly pushing back Saudi-backed mercenaries.

Pertinently, since the establishment of al-Hudaydah ceasefire within the framework of the Stockholm Agreement in 2018, Saudi Arabia has failed to adhere to it.

Despite widespread protests in Yemen over Riyadh’s non-compliance with the ceasefire agreement, the United Nations has so far taken no action to stop the Saudi-led aggression.