Yemenis to reclaim entire homeland: Senior official

The head of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council warns Saudi Arabia and the United States that the country’s forces are determined to reclaim its soil, one step at a time.

Saleh Ali al-Sammad made the remarks in a Facebook post on Saturday, saying, sooner or later, Yemen will defeat all those who violate its sovereignty under whatever pretext.

Yemen will take back its soil from Al Saud and its American masters, he said.

Sammad was referring to the controversially close alliance between Riyadh and Washington, which has seen the latter generously arming the former during its unbridled bombing of Yemen and even lending advisory support to the bombardment.

The US approved more than $20 billion in military sales to the kingdom in 2015 alone.

Saudi Arabia started the invasion in March that year and has sustained the campaign so far at the cost of thousands of Yemeni lives to restore power to Yemen’s former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a steadfast Riyadh ally, who had resigned and fled to the Saudi capital in 2014. He returned to Aden in November 2015.

Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, which set up the Supreme Political Council together with the Yemeni General People’s Congress party, after the resignation of the former government, has, meanwhile, been defending the nation against the Saudi invasion together with the army forces.

Also on Saturday, Yemen’s Saba news agency said the army’s missile unit and allied Popular Committees had fired a ballistic missile of the Qaher-1 type at a military base located in the southwestern Saudi region of Asir.

Separately, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN envoy for Yemen, announced a new bid for peace talks between the former government and Houthis.

The envoy said he was heading to Riyadh and Kuwait “to prepare for a new round” of talks, as he left the Omani capital of Muscat, where he had been negotiating with the Houthis.

He said he had found “a lot of seriousness” in talks with Ansarullah representatives.

Several previous talks and ceasefires collapsed amid repeated violations by the Saudi military and its allies.