Alwaght- The Saudi-led coalition has "pirated" one of the Yemeni Petroleum Company’s ships that was carrying more than five thousand tonnes of gas to the war-torn country.
The seizure raised the number of ships pirated by Saudi Arabia to 13, YPC spokesman Essam Al-Mutawakel told Yemen’s official Saba Net news agency on Friday.
Al-Mutawakel said the silence of the international community and the United Nations has encouraged Saudi Arabia to continue stealing Yemeni ships and preventing their entry to the strategic port of al-Hudaydah.
Such arbitrary practices are a “clear and explicit evidence that the United States is striving to suffocate the Yemeni people and increase their suffering,” he said.
The spokesman held the forces of the Saudi coalition, which he said “are led by the US and the UN,” fully responsible for the Yemeni people’s suffering, as well as for what will happen in the coming days.
Nearly six years have gone by since Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war on Yemen with the aim of reinstalling the Riyadh-backed former regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crushing the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the war has so far killed 233,000 people.
Throughout the war, Western countries, especially the US and the UK, have supported the Saudi-led coalition primarily through arms sales and technical assistance.
US President Joe Biden announced early this month that he was ending US support for the Saudi-led war, including some arms sales.
However, the UK still insists that it will not end its support for the deadly war, which persisted through petrifying outbreaks of cholera and hunger bordering on famine.
US lawmakers urge UK to end complicity
Senior US lawmakers have called on the UK to live up to its “moral responsibility” and help end both countries “complicity” in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, British daily the Guardian reported Friday.
British officials revealed this week that the UK authorized the export of almost 1.4 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia between July and September, the paper said.
Senator Ron Wyden, the Democratic chairman of the powerful finance committee and a leading critic of Saudi Arabia, told the Guardian that he believed the US should not “be in the business of selling weapons to governments with a track record of using them to commit atrocities”.
“American allies like the UK and France should follow suit immediately and stop enabling the Saudi regime,” he said.
President Joe Biden claimed last week that the US would end support for the Saudi war on Yemen, including relevant arms sales.
On Monday, the UK insisted it would not follow suit. Foreign Office minister James Cleverly said that Biden’s decision was solely a matter for Washington.
