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22-03-2021
SANA’A/ DAMASCUS/ RIYADH: The Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck military targets belonging to the Iran-aligned movement in the capital, Sanaa, in the early hours of Sunday, residents said.
The raids come after the Houthis claimed responsibility for drone attacks on an oil refinery in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Friday, which caused a fire that was brought under control.
On Saturday, the coalition said it intercepted and destroyed an explosive-laden drone launched towards the southern Saudi city of Khamis Mushait.
Residents in Sanaa told Reuters news agency that coalition warplanes bombed areas housing Houthi military camps in southern Sanaa and a military manufacturing site in the north of the city.
Houthi-run Al Masirah television also reported coalition air strikes on the capital, including on Sanaa airport.
The rebels have stepped up attacks inside Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, in recent weeks. Saudi Arabia says it intercepts most of the drones and missiles that the Houthis launch at airports, air bases and energy infrastructure, but some do inflict damage.
The Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Houthis since March 2015, months after the group seized Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The war has ground into a deadlock since then, with Saudi Arabia facing international criticism for its indiscriminate air strikes.
The United Nations has described the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster with mass hunger, disease and poverty, largely caused by the war. The conflict has killed about 130,000 people including more than 12,000 civilians.
In renewed diplomatic efforts to end the war, the United Nations and United 
States have urged the Houthis – who are also pressing an offensive against the government-held city of Marib in Yemen – to turn to negotiations rather than military escalation.
Analysts say the Houthi push into Marib – which until recently has been relatively peaceful and stable because of well-protected oilfields nearby – threatens to ignite more fighting elsewhere in Yemen.
Meanwhile, government-allied forces have ramped up attacks in other areas recently in an apparent attempt to force the Houthis to spread out their resources and make them more vulnerable.
Meanwhile, Syrian government artillery fire killed five civilians, including a child, when it hit a hospital entrance in Syria’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib, Turkey’s defence ministry and a war monitor said.
The attack on Sunday on the northwestern town of Atareb came despite a Russian-Turkish ceasefire since March 2020, supposedly to protect the wider rebel-held stronghold.
The shelling “hit the courtyard and main entrance of the hospital inside a cave, killing five civilians including a child and a hospital employee,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Eleven others were wounded including healthcare staff, said the Britain-based monitoring group’s head Rami Abdurrahman.
The hospital is located underground, a tactic used by the opposition to avoid being targeted in the conflict-prone area.
The Idlib region is home to 2.9 million people, of whom two-thirds have been displaced from their homes by conflict, the United Nations says.
The ceasefire brokered by rebel backer Turkey and regime ally Russia last March stemmed a months-long regime military offensive on the bastion that killed hundreds of civilians and displaced more than a million people from their homes.
It has since largely held despite repeated violations including Russian air strikes on the region, according to the Syrian Observatory.
Medical facilities have been hit multiple times in the Idlib region during the war, attacks which are mostly blamed on government and allied forces.
The United States-based Physicians for Human Rights has documented 598 attacks on at least 350 separate healthcare facilities in Syria since March 2011, the vast majority of them allegedly committed by the Syrian government and allied forces, including Russia. In the same 10-year period, at least 930 
medical personnel were killed, the rights group said.
Between 2016 and 2019, the World Health Organization documented up to 337 attacks on healthcare sites in Syria’s northwest.
The health directorate in the rebel-controlled northwest said Sunday’s attack was the first on a medical facility in the region since February 2020.
The civil war has killed more than 388,000 people and displaced millions at home and abroad since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
Seventy percent of healthcare workers have fled Syria since the start of the conflict, while after years of bombardment, only 58 percent of hospitals remain fully functional, the UN says. (Int’l News Desk)
