Saudi-led coalition says intercepted Houthi armed drone attack

The Saudi-led military coalition engaged in Yemen said it had intercepted and destroyed an armed drone on Sunday launched by the Iran-aligned Houthi movement towards southern Saudi Arabia, reports Reuters.

The alleged bomb-laden unmanned aerial vehicle aimed to target “civilians and civilian objects”, coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said in a statement carried on Saudi state media.

The coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 against the Houthis after the group ousted the Saudi-backed government from power in the capital Sanaa, in a conflict widely seen in the region as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Read: US to drop Houthi terrorist designation due to Yemen crisis

The State Department has recently announced it will be halting arms sales to the Saudi coalition authorised by Trump, which includes munitions to the Saudis and a $23 billion package of F-35 jets to the kingdom’s coalition partner, the UAE.

Last week, two Yemeni families filed a petition against the US government over “unlawful” killings, which included nine children among the victims. The petition is seeking justice for 34 relatives who were alleged to have been killed in several US “counter-terrorism” operations in the country between 2013 and 2018.

The human rights group Reprieve submitted the petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on the families’ behalf on Tuesday, claiming six drone strikes and a special operations raid were carried out in the aforementioned period.