Yemeni Official Says US Should Lift Siege to Prove Its Sincerity
Mohammed Ali al-Houthi tweeted on Saturday that the US claims it has removed the designations of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah movement from the list of foreign terrorist organizations due to human crisis.
“If it was true, so why not lift the siege on the Yemeni people to end the humanitarian crisis forever?” he questioned.
Houthi emphasized that the US is “only playing with words in order to mislead the public opinion as it continues with its acts of terror, aggression and blockade of Yemen.”
The administration of US President Joe Biden in February formally notified Congress that it will remove Yemen’s popular Ansarullah movement from the list of foreign terrorist organizations, reversing a last-minute designation by former president Donald Trump.
“Secretary [Antony] Blinken has been clear about undertaking an expeditious review of the designations of Ansarullah given the profound implications for the people of Yemen, home to the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe,” an unnamed State Department official confirmed.
On January 11, nine days before Biden was sworn into office, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Trump’s intent to designate Yemen’s Ansarullah movement as terrorist.
The Trump administration’s last-minute “terrorist” designation appeared to be a desperate attempt to step up pressure on the popular Ansarullah movement after the Saudi regime failed to fulfill the objectives of its war on Yemen, despite all the support it had received from the US and other Western states.
The popular Ansarullah movement, backed by the Yemeni armed forces and allied popular groups, has gone from strength to strength against the Saudi-led invaders, and successfully defended Yemen, leaving Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the county.
Saudi Arabia has been leading a war on Yemen since March 2015, in hopes of reinstating former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and destroying the Ansarullah movement.
The war, which the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the impoverished Arab country over the last six years.
Saudi Arabia has been the main recipient of US weapons over the past years.
A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) revealed in March that more than a third of the global arms sold worldwide during the past five years originated in the United States, while Saudi Arabia was the world's largest weapons importer during the period.
