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Saudi war on Yemen completely unlawful, unjustified: Analyst

Monday, 14 November 2016 4:31 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 14 November 2016 4:50 PM ]

A Yemeni inspects damaged houses following Saudi air strikes on October 27, 2016 in Khamis Bani Saad district in al-Mahwit governorate. (Photo by AFP)

Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a deadly war against Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to bring the country's former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement. The offensive has so far killed 11,400 amid countless reports suggesting deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilian infrastructure by Saudi jets and mercenaries.

Saudi Arabia’s military aggression against Yemen is “completely unlawful and unjustified” by any measure, says an international lawyer.

“This belligerent attack on a sovereign state by Saudi Arabia is nothing short of completely outrageous and the support Saudi Arabia has received from the United States and from the UK is equally outrageous,” Barry Grossman told Press TV in an interview on Monday.

He also stated Yemen war was originally justified on the basis that the Houthi Ansarullah movement presented a threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity which is “quite absurd”.

He went on to say it is clear that the Saudi war on Yemen is entirely concerned with maintaining a puppet government in the impoverished Arab country.

“The reality of this belligerent attack on Yemen is that the Saudis simply want to maintain their control of Yemen by having a puppet government in Yemen and from the start they have been engaged in a brutal, unlawful, belligerent war on Yemen which is itself a sovereign state,” he said.

The analyst further lashed out at the United States and Britain for their continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite the large number of civilian deaths in Yemen.

“So the whole thing is a mess, it is another shining example of the way the Atlantic World basically engineers military interventions which violate international law. They intervene politically in ways that make sure it is not an even fight and they do nothing to correct the situation except occasionally complain about so-called human rights abuses and complain about the number of casualties which they themselves are responsible for,” he stated.

Grossman further noted the United Nations has never passed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Yemen, adding that the issue is not just the number of casualties but it is the fact that the war itself has no “legal basis”.

He concluded by saying that Saudi Arabia seeks to assert its control over the Middle East and there is absolutely nothing that can justify its intervention in Yemen.

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