'US & UK can stop Yemen war today, but they love Saudi money'
The US should be held accountable for the death of civilians in Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in Yemen, Yemeni journalist Hussain Albukhaiti told RT. As he spoke, he held up a US-made cluster bomb he said was found by children.
The journalist spoke about the most recent airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition in the Hamdan district of Sanaa that killed six civilians and injured another six. A home was hit in the attack, where parents lived with their four children. Only two children from the entire family survived. Shocking footage of the aftermath shows them trapped under the rubble of their home, unable to escape from a concrete dungeon. Albukhaiti, whose friend filmed the harrowing scenes, told RT that the children had to wait for hours until rescuers came, as Saudi fighter jets were preventing them from accessing the area with a brutal 'double-tap' air strike.
Her name is SeiyunShe was trappdonly asking for some water1rescuer said:she is injrd,just give her little amount of water!Seiyun said:im NOT injrd!She only feels been thirsty,aftr #Saudi#UAE jet tryed2prevent rescuers 4hours frm reaching siteThis is DOUBLE tapINFO👆thrd pic.twitter.com/xCzf1uP9kr
— Hussain Albukhaiti (@HussainBukhaiti) May 10, 2018
'Double-tap' attacks, a tactic employed extensively by the Saudis, means that a follow-up strike comes after the initial one, as soon as rescuers or people mourning the victims show up.
The girl shown in the video was so numb from the hours of waiting that she could not feel her body anymore and only asked for water.
"Just imagine, she was waiting for hours for rescues, and she was thirsty, and she could not feel her body, and she thought she was not injured. And you can see, totally, in the footage that she was really badly injured," Albukhaiti said.
While dozens of civilians, including children, perish in Saudi-led air raids every week, the only thing the US seems to be interested in is the origin of the missiles launched by Houthi rebels, whom the Saudis are fighting, the journalist said.
"And these missiles are only used to defend Yemen, they are not used as these cluster bombs, they are not dropped on villages. This shows the double standards of the US, they only care about money, about how much they want to get from the Saudi-led coalition," he said.
The US, along with the UK, keeps fomenting the conflict with a steady supply of weapons to Riyadh. That includes banned cluster bombs that Saudi warplanes are dropping on civilians, Albukhaiti claimed. He brought the wreckage of one such bomb to the RT studio, a Blue 97AB, which he said the children in one of the villages in the Saada area gave him six months after the hostilities began.
"We have these bombs in Yemen and the only country who is actually using these bombs, only country that imposed a blockade on Yemen, only jets that are in the sky in Yemen are Saudi fighter jets that are fueled by US jets, and all the coordinates, all the satellite images, all logistics supply is coming from the US, and the only thing that the US is caring about is what types of missiles that Yemen has or the Houthis have," he said.
"So I would like to see the US to explain how come these bombs are in Yemeni villages," he added.
It is within the power of the West to stop the Saudi bombing campaign, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians, has brought the war-ravaged country on the brink of a famine and led to the outbreaks of cholera and malaria, Albukhaiti said.
But that's unlikely to happen because it would mean ending the massive cash flow from American and British weapons sales.
"Of course, the United States and the United Kingdom can decide today to stop this war but if this war against Yemen is stopped it will mean that Saudis do not need the weapons they are buying from the UK and the US as well."
"They just love money, they want just to continue to sell weapons to make money and this is how democracy exists in the US and the UK."
