Press TV- The Emirati Foreign Ministry has summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires in protest at what Abu Dhabi claims to be Tehran’s “provision of weapons” to Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah fighters, an allegation the Islamic Republic has repeatedly dismissed as unfounded.

Abdul Rahim al-Awadi, the United Arab Emirates' assistant minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for legal affairs, handed the Iranian envoy a note of protest, the official Emirates News Agency reported on Thursday.

Awadi said Iran’s alleged provision of arms to the Houthis violates a number of United Nations Security Council resolutions, which prohibit such arms supplies.

Iranian officials have not made any comment on the report yet.

The United Arab Emirates is a key Saudi ally in its deadly aggression against Yemen that was launched in March 2015 in a bid to reinstall the ex-Yemeni government and crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement.



[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="555"] People walk on the rubble of a house destroyed by a Saudi airstrike in Sana'a, Yemen, February 2, 2017. (Photo by Reuters)[/caption]

The Riyadh regime and its regional and Western partners, including the US, have on numerous occasions accused Iran of shipping arms to Yemen's Ansarullah fighters. Tehran has strongly rejected the claims as baseless and unsubstantiated.

The anti-Iran accusations have surfaced again as the Saudi-led coalition and its mercenaries have been suffering major blows on the battleground at the hands of Yemen’s Houthi fighters and allied armed forces, who are defending the civilian population against Riyadh’s offensive.

Political analysts believe that such allegation raised by the so-called Saudi-led coalition is aimed at covering up failure of the government in Riyadh and its allies to achieve their goals in the impoverished Arab country. The coalition's frustration at the failure of its bloody aggression against defenseless Yemenis has caused Saudi rulers and their allies to resort to such blame game in order to deflect the world's public opinion from the disastrous situation in Yemen.

The military aggression has destroyed much of Yemen's infrastructure. It has also claimed the lives of over 11,400 Yemenis, including women and children, according to the latest tally by a Yemeni monitoring group.

Britain and the US have largely contributed to the Saudi campaign by providing huge amounts of weapons and military training to Riyadh’s military.

Washington and London have turned a deaf ear to repeated calls by major international rights groups to drop their support for the deadly Saudi campaign.

Late last month, the US went as far as carrying out a series of ground and air raids against a village in the Yemeni province of Bayda, killing dozens of people, among them civilians.