Yemen: 60 Saudi mercs killed in convoy attack

Yemeni forces have staged a retaliatory missile attack on a military convoy in a border area located in Saudi Arabia’s extreme southwest, killing as many as 60 mercenaries, the al-Masirah television reports.

The counterattack came on Friday when Saudi military vehicles were traversing a border passage in the Najran region, the television cited a Yemeni army official as saying.

The channel, which aired the footage of the incident, said the missile barrage had also injured a great number of the mercenaries and destroyed three of their US-made Abrams tanks and six armored vehicles.

Yemen’s military has been carrying out tit-for-tat attacks against the gatherings of Saudi mercenaries inside Yemen as well as targets in Saudi Arabia’s southwest in retaliation for Riyadh’s military campaign against the country.

On Monday, Yemeni army spokesman Sharaf Luqman told Lebanon’s al-Manar television that Yemeni forces were present “20 kilometers inside the Saudi soil.”

The war was launched in March 2015 to bring back to power a Saudi ally as Yemen’s president. More than 10,000 people have died in the war, according to the United Nations (UN).

In one of the deadliest attacks in Yemen, Saudi warplanes bombarded a funeral hall packed with mourners in Sana’a last Saturday, killing over 140 people and injuring at least 525 others.

On Saturday, Saudi jets pounded the Bani Hushaysh district in the west-central Yemeni province of Sana’a as well as the Sahar district in the northwestern Sa’ada Province several times.

The Saudi Interior Ministry also confirmed that a Saudi soldier had been killed in the Jizan region in the country’s remote southwest, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

Citing a ministry spokesperson, SPA said the fatality had been caused a day earlier during confrontations between Saudi border guards and Yemeni forces in Jizan’s Da’er area. The official named the trooper as Khaled Ali Mohammad Assiri.