Saudi king had better directly face Iran if he has scores to settle: Yemen’s Ansarullah

A senior Yemeni Houthi Ansarullah official has asked Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz to settle scores with Iran if he dares to face the Islamic Republic directly.

Mohammed-Ali al-Houthi, the chairman of Yemen’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, made the remarks in a sarcastic tweet on Friday.

“King Salman well knows the Yemenis are only fighting the Americans who are using the Saudi soil and US-made weapons to wage a war against the Yemeni nation,” al-Houthi said.

“If the Saudi king has scores to settle with Iran, he’d better face the country directly,” he added.

The Yemeni official made the remarks in reaction to the Saudi king’s virtual address to the 75th General Assembly of the United Nations, in which he said Riyadh would not take its hands off the Yemeni nation until it “gets rid of Iran’s domination”.

King Salman blamed the Islamic Republic for much of the Middle East’s instability, and repeated a host of baseless accusations against Iran, ranging from “sponsoring terrorism” to seeking weapons of mass destruction.

The video of the speech was released on Wednesday showing the aging monarch sitting at his office as he struggled to read the text from papers, which he was grasping with both hands, without looking at the camera.

The 84-year-old monarch accused Iran of providing support to Yemen’s popular Houthi Ansarullah movement, which has been defending the Arab country against the kingdom’s 2015-present war. He once again blamed Iran for the 2019 Yemeni attacks against Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil installations.

The Saudi ruler also took aim at the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, claiming Tehran exploited the agreement to “intensify its expansionist activities.” He also claimed “the kingdom’s hands were extended to Iran in peace with a positive and open attitude over the past decades, but to no avail.”

Iran strongly dismissed the king’s claims, and highlighted the Saudi regime’s atrocities and civilian massacres in Yemen, of which King Salman made no reference during the speech.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the Saudis are engaging in such a blame game to “escape responsibility for their own war crimes against Yemeni women and children.

“The continuous military and political defeats in Yemen have sent Saudi Arabia into a state of delirium.”

“As the birthplace and origin of the ideas of Takfiri terrorist groups and as the main financial and logistical supporter of terrorism in the region, Saudi Arabia has, for many years, been pursuing a policy of blame games and distorting the realities to escape accountability for its crimes,” Khatibzadeh said.

“The Saudi regime’s support for and alignment with the United States in keeping up the failed policy of ‘maximum pressure’ against Iran as well as [the kingdom’s] attempts to expand relations with the occupying Zionist regime and [paying] billions of dollars in bribe money to others from the pockets of the people of the country, has not only failed to bring results for them, but has turned Saudi Arabia into a humiliated entity among the Arab states.”

Khatibzadeh also noted that the Islamic Republic, in line with its responsible regional approach, has repeatedly warned the world about “the Saudis’ miscalculations — which have inflicted heavy costs on the region — and still stresses its principled policy of strengthening diplomatic and dialog-based processes in the region and developing relations with all its neighbors.”