Hardline Iranian media are enthusiastically speculating that the conflict in Yemen will soon enter a more dangerous phase with the intensification in the use of missiles by the Yemeni rebels. “It was on Sunday [February 5] that Yemeni revolutionaries fired a long-range missile at a military site outside of Riyadh,” Kayhan noted.
The hardline Iranian newspaper lauded this as a “new strategic posture” toward Saudi Arabia. “City for city, capital for capital,” a Yemeni anti-government representative was quoted to have threatened the Saudis with as the conflict in Yemen continues. Kayhan quoted the Yemeni rebel leaders to state the missiles to be fired at Saudi Arabia are “designed and produced by Yemeni specialists” and the new policy is aimed to press Saudi Arabia to rethink its role in the military conflict in the country.
Comment: This same article makes references to the Yemeni rebel missiles having a range of 1,300km. However, it remains to be seen if the Yemeni rebel claims are proven to be true. Riyadh has already cast doubts about the capacity of the rebels to hit targets beyond the Yemeni-Saudi border regions. Nonetheless, the question of Iran’s role in supplying the Yemeni rebels with weaponry will not go away anytime soon. The Trump administration recently introduced more sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile tests and for exporting weapons to its proxies such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Yemeni rebels.
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