'Saudi Arabia seeking to force Yemenis to break away from govt.'

Saudi Arabia’s military aggression against neighboring Yemen has left over 12,000 Yemeni people dead since March 2015. In the latest such violence, Saudi warplanes pounded a market in northwest Yemen, killing at least two dozen people as they were purchasing staples for an Islamic festivity on Saturday night. Press TV has asked Jim W. Dean, managing editor of the Veterans Today from Boston, and Richard Millet, a journalist and political commentator from London, to share their views as to why Saudi Arabia keeps bombing non-military areas in Yemen despite its technologically advanced precision weapons.

Jim W. Dean said that the Arab kingdom is using a war of attrition in Yemen in order to put pressure on the Yemeni people to break away from their government and accept the Saudi hegemony.

“This is a war of attrition against the population to undermine their support for the government; so that they would be willing to take peace on Saudi terms, which is [for them to] be a colony of Saudi Arabia,” the commentator said.

He added that instead of striking key military assets in Yemen, Saudi forces target the civilian population to undermine their support for the Yemeni fighters’ resistance against the aggression.

Saudi Arabia, which has seen Yemen as its backyard for decades, is pushing for reinstalling a puppet government there. But an alliance between the Houthi Ansarullah movement and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh has so far foiled the Saudi plot.

The Yemenis are basically “fighting for their independence” which is hard for the Al Saud regime to tolerate, Dean explained.

Saudi Arabia, he argued, considers the existence of an Arab nation on its border where elections are held and people pick their own leaders as a mortal threat.

The analyst denounced the bloody Saudi bombings on Yemeni civilian areas, and noted that even though Saudi forces are supplied with precision weapons by their Western allies that can be used to strike military targets, they use their arms to kill civilians.

Meanwhile, Richard Millet put the blame on both the Houthi Ansarullah movement and Saudi Arabia for the violation of human rights in Yemen.

“There have been humanitarian breaches and war crimes on both sides,” he said, adding that the way to stop the escalation of war in Yemen is to stop human rights violations.

Millet, however, downplayed the blockade and bombardment of the Yemeni people and described the Saudi aggression against Yemen as a “defensive” measure.

The analyst claimed that the Saudi airstrike campaign on the Yemeni people is a “defensive war” because, Saudis “do have a right to stop attacks” on their country.

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