Tabnak – In an address to the media last night, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley accused Iran of arming Yemen’s Ansarullah movement and to make the region unstable. Iranian officials have strongly reacted to these accusations, reminding the Americans their own war-crimes in Yemen.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif highlighted Washington’s complicity in war crimes committed in Yemen, saying that since the beginning of the war, “the US has sold weapons enabling its allies to kill civilians and impose famine”.
“While Iran has been calling for ceasefire, aid and dialogue in Yemen from day 1, US has sold weapons enabling its allies to kill civilians and impose famine,” Zarif said on his Twitter account on Friday. “No amount of alternative facts or alternative evidence covers up US complicity in war crimes,” he added in his tweet.
Zarif made the remarks in response to US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who claimed that the Islamic Republic has supplied Yemen with ballistic missiles. During her press conference on Thursday, Haley appeared standing before parts of a ballistic missile that she claimed Iran delivered to Houthis in Yemen, who then fired it at the Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia last month.
In a tweet earlier on Thursday, the Iranian top diplomat had likened Haley’s speech to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim in 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Separately, in a statement released on Thursday, Iran's UN mission categorically dismissed Haley's claim as "unfounded" and said, "This purported evidence ... is as much fabricated as the one presented on some other occasions earlier."
The Iranian Ambassador to the UN, Gholam Ali Khoshroo, also rejected his American counterpart’s claims and said the “show” Haley put up earlier in the day was merely meant to cover up Washington’s own supply of lethal weapons to the Saudi regime, which have resulted in the deaths of Yemeni women and children.
“Iran wants peace, dialog and an immediate ceasefire and a halt to bombardments” against Yemen, said the senior diplomat, emphasizing that the US “must, above all, end its arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”
Iranian ambassador to the UK was another official who denounced allegations raised by Haley against Iran at the Defense Intelligence Agency stressing that such accusations could not be proven.
Reacting to Haley's allegations, Hamid Baeedinejad posted a series of tweets on Friday saying, “Nikki Haley in her propaganda show could not prove that: a/what exhibited was an Iranian missile, and if so, b/ the missile was exactly the one which hit the KSA airport (nobody trusts American just to say so), and c/ it had been transferred to Yemen after the UN res.”
It’s worth mentioning that since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.
Over 14,000 Yemenis, including thousands of women and children, have lost their lives in the deadly military campaign.
