Tasnim – Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri denounced as “absurd” recent remarks made by US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley about Iran’s missile support for Yemen.

This person’s comments have their roots in her lack of understanding of military issues, Brigadier General Jazayeri said in response to Haley, who claimed that the Islamic Republic has supplied Yemen with ballistic missiles.

“If the Americans had been informed of the high level of the Yemeni resistance’s missile technology, they would have refused to make such absurd comments,” the commander noted.

During her press conference on Thursday, Haley appeared standing before parts of a ballistic missile that she claimed Iran delivered to Houthis in Yemen, who then fired it at the Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia last month.

In a tweet earlier on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had likened Haley’s speech to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim in 2003 that Iraq possessed WMD.

Powell’s 2003 speech to the UN laid out the Bush administration’s case for a war in Iraq. Powell in 2016 called the speech “a great intelligence failure”.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations Gholam Ali Khoshroo also rejected Haley’s claim as “baseless” and said the accusations are aimed at covering up the Saudi war crimes in Yemen with the US complicity.

Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by a coalition led by the Saud regime for nearly three years but Riyadh has reached none of its objectives in Yemen so far.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

Over 14,000 Yemenis, including thousands of women and children, have lost their lives in the deadly military campaign.