Yemeni retaliatory attacks leave five Saudi soldiers dead

At least five Saudi soldiers have been killed when Yemeni army soldiers and fighters from allied Popular Committees launched separate attacks in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border region of Jizan as they continue their retaliatory raids against the Riyadh regime’s aerial bombardment campaign.

A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that Yemeni forces and their allies fatally shot the soldiers in Hamezah village, al-Farizeh military base, and near another village called Quwa on Thursday evening.

The source added that Yemeni sources also sprayed a Saudi military vehicle with machine gun fire in Hamezah village.

Yemeni army soldiers and Popular Committees fighters also fired a salvo of artillery rounds at a gathering of Saudi forces in Qais Mountain and al-Haskoul base in Jizan. There were no immediate reports on the number of possible causalities and the extent of damage caused.

Separately, Yemeni artillery units targeted a Saudi battle tank in al-Sadis military base of the kingdom’s Najran region, located 844 kilometers (524 miles) south of the capital Riyadh.

Moreover, Saudi military aircraft carried out four airstrikes against Harf Sufyan district of Yemen’s northwestern province of Amran, with no reports of casualties immediately available.

Saudi fighter jets also launched two aerial attacks against Haydan and Saqayn districts in the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada, though no casualties have so far been reported.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in 2015. Much of the country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The Saudi-led war has also triggered a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.

According to the World Health Organization’s latest tally, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April 2017 and is suspected to have infected 841,906.

In November 2017, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, said more than 11 million children in Yemen were in acute need of aid, stressing that it was estimated that every 10 minutes a child died of a preventable disease there.

Additionally, the UN has described the current level of hunger in Yemen as “unprecedented,” emphasizing that 17 million people were food insecure in the country.

The world body says that 6.8 million, meaning almost one in four people, do not have enough food and rely entirely on external assistance.