Alwaght- A Saudi helicopter has been shot during military operations in Yemen on Tuesday, killing 13 officers aboard.
Saudi regime military sources claim the US-made Black Hawk helicopter went down due to ‘friendly fire’ in Marib province, east of the capital Sanaa.
Local sources say the helicopter was shot down 5 km (3 miles) from its landing spot because of a technical fault that caused a misreading of the air defense system, which resulted in the destruction of the plane before it landed.
Yemen’s official news agency, Saba confirmed that the helicopter crashed in an area known as al-Tadaween, northeast of the Marib provincial capital, and 13 officers and troops had died.
Saudis and allies have also suffered significant casualties in the operation on Yemen as official estimates say more than 500 soldiers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain have been killed since aggression against the impoverished state commenced in March 2015.
Meanwhile on Tuesday Yemeni media reported that more than 100 Saudi-backed militants were killed in an operation in the southern province of Ta’izz. They said most of those killed had been hiding in mountainous regions near the port of Mokha.
Saba news agency reported that during the operation, the country’s army backed by popular forces retook control over sites of the Saudi-paid mercenaries in the east of Mokha district of Taiz province.
For more than two years now, Yemen has borne the brunt of a brutal Saudi-led and US-backed aggression which has left over 12,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians including women and children killed. The Saudi regime launched its illegal aggression on Yemen to undermine the Ansarullah movement and restore to power fugitive Abdul Rabuh Mansour Hadi who resigned and fled the country.
