Yemen Urges US, Saudi Aggressors to Prepare Retreat Plan After Afghanistan Fiasco
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A senior Yemeni official has called on the US and Saudi Arabia to set out a plan for a withdrawal from Yemen, following America's humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, warning that the Arab country will eventually become a "graveyard for aggressors."
The remarks were made by Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, chairman of Yemen's Supreme Revolutionary Committee, in a post on his Twitter account on Tuesday, after the US announced an end to chaotic withdrawal efforts from Kabul's airport, effectively ending its two-decade occupation of the South Asian country.
“With the departure of the last American colonizers from Afghanistan, I call on the United States and its Saudi ally to leave Yemen too and devise a plan to that effect so that the Yemeni people can live in stability and away from occupation and guardianship,” Houthi tweeted, Press TV reported.
“The Yemeni nation will never accept occupation and guardianship, no matter how long the conflicts and confrontations last. Yemen will be the graveyard of the aggressors.”
Saudi Arabia launched a US-backed military aggression against Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with a number of its allied states in a bid to return to power the former Riyadh-backed regime and crush the Ansarullah movement.
Now, the kingdom is stuck in a costly quagmire, with Yemeni forces conducting retaliatory attacks on Saudi targets.
The US commander responsible for American troops in Afghanistan announced the end of the Afghan war on Monday afternoon, the deadline US President Joe Biden had set for the withdrawal.
General Kenneth McKenzie said that the US and its allies had evacuated 123,000 people during the 18-day airlift but conceded the military had not been able to rescue every American citizen or Afghan ally.
At a press conference held on the Kabul airport tarmac, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the US had been defeated and celebrated Afghanistan’s “independence.”
The country is now a “free and sovereign nation,” Al Jazeera quoted him as saying. “This victory belongs to us all.”
The US military led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 in what it proclaimed was a war on terror meant to eradicate the Taliban.
Twenty years on, the Afghan government and military collapsed in the face of the Taliban’s swift advances on the ground, which many attribute to a hasty withdrawal of US-led foreign forces from the country.
The messy US exit was marred by deadly bombing attacks outside the Kabul airport by the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.
