Two explosions were heard in Riyadh in the early hours of the morning, according to an Agence France-Presse reporter in the Saudi Arabian capital, a kingdom against which the Yemeni rebel movement Ansar Allah—also known by the surname of its leaders, Houthi—which is aligned with Iran—has continued to launch attacks in recent days.
The Saudi Civil Defense reported a short while earlier that an alert system had been activated to warn civilians of a potential threat.
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Later, a spokesperson for the military coalition led by the Kingdom—which has intervened in the war in Yemen on the side of the internationally recognized government— reported that an unmanned aerial vehicle and a ballistic missile had been intercepted.
“A drone was intercepted and destroyed in the eastern region,” said coalition spokesman Saudi Colonel Nouri al-Maliki, before adding that “Air defense forces intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by the Houthi terrorist paramilitary group against Riyadh.”
Since the beginning of the month, Ansar Allah has stepped up its attacks against Saudi Arabia, with the one targeting Riyadh International Airport being the deadliest in the kingdom in years.
The movement has, however, denied some of Riyadh’s accusations of attacks using unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles against the kingdom, which ranks first in global oil productionin the world.
Saudi Arabia intervened in the war in Yemen in March 2015, leading a military coalition, one year after the war escalated in the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, with Ansar Allah seizing the capital, Sana’a, and vast swaths of territory in the south.
Following a fragile ceasefire that lasted about four years, the war in Yemen reignited in July, a few months after war broke out in the Middle East following the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran, which plunged the region into crisis.
The war in Yemen has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions.
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Source: KYPE
