New York: Commander of the Houthi forces has announced Houthis are ready for a “long-term confrontation” with the United States and Britain. This comes after Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed to have hit an American Navy ship in the Gulf of Aden with a missile on January 28.
The attack was in response to Israel’s war on Gaza and the ‘aggression’ of the US and the UK against Yemen, said the Houthi fighters in a statement. “We are prepared for a long-term confrontation with the forces of tyranny. The Americans, the British, and those who coordinated with them must realize the power of the sovereign Yemeni decision and that there is no debate or dispute over it,” Mohamed al-Atifi said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The United States and the United Kingdom jointly carried out fresh airstrikes on eight targets used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen on January 22, in a bid to stop the group from harassing commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The airstrikes marked the eighth round of allied attacks in 12 days. The strikes targeted an underground storage site and locations linked to the Houthis’ “missile and air surveillance capabilities,” the US and UK said in a joint statement along with partners Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands.
The statement claimed that the airstrikes were meant to “disrupt and degrade” the Houthis’ capabilities. “These precision strikes are intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities that the Houthis use to threaten global trade and the lives of innocent mariners,” the statement said, adding that the rebel group had carried out “a series of illegal, dangerous, and destabilizing” actions since the previous joint US-UK air raids.
Yemen’s official Saba news agency claimed that “American-British forces are launching raids on the capital of Sanaa” and several other parts of Yemen, while Houthi TV outlet al-Masirah said four strikes targeted the Al-Dailami military base north of the capital, which is under rebel control.
The airstrikes were the most significant in a series of attacks since the first wave of missile and Tomahawk launches by the US and the UK in the early hours of January 12 against the Houthis, who have caused chaos for shippers worldwide and disrupted traffic through waterway that previously accounted for 12 per cent of global trade.
