„Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are using hospitals as military command posts, thereby deliberately putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk, according to a new report into Yemen’s long-running civil war. Hostilities in the Yemeni conflict resumed at the weekend following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait. The talks came after Houthi fighters, who are backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards, rejected a U.N.-sponsored peace plan and announced the establishment of a 10-member governing body to run the country. Within hours of the peace talks ending, the Saudi-led military coalition, which is backed by both the U.S. and Britain, had resumed air strikes against Houthi rebel positions in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. Initial reports said that at least 21 people, the majority of them civilians, had been killed, including a number of workers in a potato chip factory in Sana’a. (…)
Both sides in the conflict have been accused of causing unnecessary civilian casualties, with the Saudis, who have suffered significant casualties of their own, being singled out for particular censure over the way they have conducted coalition air strikes. But an investigation conducted by coalition officials into claims that Saudi warplanes have directly targeted civilians found that the air strikes had been justified, because the Iranian-backed rebels had been using civilian institutions, such as hospitals, as command posts to launch attacks against coalition forces and their allies. (…) The revelation that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are deliberately using civilian institutions for their war effort inevitably will draw comparisons with the tactics used by other radical Islamist groups such Hamas, which regularly uses institutions such as hospitals to launch attacks against Israel.“
(Con Coughlin: „Iran-Backed Rebels Use Hospitals as Human Shields“)
