Defeated Saudi-led Coalition ‘Steals’ Iraq Documentary Footage to Accuse Yemen Forces

By Staff, Agencies

In yet another defeat, the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen since 2015 resorted to “stealing” excerpts from a documentary about Iraq claiming they are used by the Yemeni defense forces of “militarizing” Yemen’s key port city.

The report by Yemen’s al-Masirah network was released on Sunday, a day after the coalition’s spokesman Turki al-Maliki displayed the footage during an event, alleging that the Yemeni forces were using the al-Hudaydah port to stockpile missiles.

“The scenes that al-Maliki claimed were missiles in the port of al-Hudaydah were extracted from a documentary film called ‘Severe Clear,’ filmed in 2003 at the beginning of the American invasion of Iraq,” the network wrote.

The documentary essentially “presented the memoirs of First Lieutenant Mike Scotty in addition to videos that he and his colleagues from the first battalion filmed for the Marines,” it added.

The network further found it “ironic” that the spokesman had alleged during the presentation that the exact location of the missiles “cannot be disclosed.”

Leading several of its allies, the Saudi kingdom launched a war against the Arab world’s already poorest nation in March 2015. The war has been seeking to restore power in Yemen to the country’s former Riyadh-allied officials.

The coalition has stopped short of its goals, while killing tens of thousands of Yemenis through the aggression and a simultaneous siege that it has been imposing on the impoverished country, most notably al-Hudaydah, which serves as Yemen’s lifeline port of entry.