Saudi fighter crashes in Yemen, rebels say plane shot down

RIYADH — A Saudi fighter jet crashed in conflict-torn Yemen, the Riyadh-led military coalition backing the government said Saturday, as the country's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed to have shot it down.

The Tornado aircraft came down Friday in northern Al-Jawf province during an operation to support government forces, the coalition said in a statement, in a rare crash that marks a setback for a military alliance known for its air supremacy.

The statement released by the official Saudi Press Agency did not specify the fate of the crew or the cause of the crash, which comes amid an upsurge in fighting between the warring parties that threatens to worsen Yemen’s humanitarian crisis.

The Houthi rebels said they will release footage showing the launch of its “advanced surface-to-air missile” and the moment it downed the jet.

The insurgents reported multiple coalition air strikes on Saturday in the Houthi-controlled area where the plane went down as local residents gathered near the wreckage, according to the rebels’ Al Masirah television.

The bombing raids left “dozens” of people dead or wounded, Al Masirah added, a report that could not be immediately verified by local aid workers.

‘Massively expanded arsenal’ 

The escalation follows fierce fighting around the Houthi-held capital Sanaa, with the rebels seen to be advancing on several fronts towards Hazm, the regional capital of Al Jouf.

The province of Al-Jouf has been mostly controlled by the Houthis, but with its capital still in the hands of the Saudi-backed government.

The coalition intervened against the Houthis in 2015, first with air and naval forces before ground forces were also brought into the fray.

The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians, and sparked what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

If the Houthi claim is confirmed, the rare downing of a coalition warplane signals the rebels’ growing military arsenal.

“At the start of the conflict the Huthis were a ragtag militia,” Fatima Abo Alasrar, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, told AFP. 

“Today they have massively expanded their arsenal with the help of Iran and its proxy Hizbollah,” Lebanon’s powerful Shiite movement.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels are in possession of new weapons similar to those produced in Iran, according to a UN report obtained by AFP earlier this month, in potential violation of a UN arms embargo.

Some of the new weapons, which the rebels have possessed since 2019, “have technical characteristics similar to arms manufactured in the Islamic Republic of Iran”, said the report, compiled by a panel of UN experts tasked with monitoring the embargo.

The panel didn’t say whether the weapons were delivered to the Houthis directly by the Iranian government, which has repeatedly denied sending them arms.

The coalition, separately, has been widely criticised for the high civilian death toll from its bombing campaign, which has prompted some Western governments to cut arms deliveries to the countries taking part.

On Wednesday, the coalition said it would put on trial military personnel suspected of being behind deadly air strikes on Yemeni civilians.

The cases being investigated include a 2018 air strike on a school bus in the northern region of Dahyan that killed at least 40 children, Saudi-based Arab News said.