Sanaa, September 19: Former leader of South Yemen Ali Salim al-Beidh has accused the Sana’a government of committing war crimes against Shia Muslim fighters in the north of the country.
Expressing solidarity with the northern fighters al-Beidh on Friday condemned the army’s air strike on a refugee camp which left over 80 civilians dead and described the attack as a “war crime”.
Witnesses say many of those killed in the raid were women, children and old people.
“The Sana’a regime has in recent days brought slaughter upon innocent citizens in Saada and is carrying out a group extermination that it proudly called ‘scorched earth’,” he said, according to the southern opposition website Baraqesh.net
Salim al-Beidh has been in exile since the 1994 civil war which saw the north under President Ali Abdullah Saleh take control of the whole country.
The former north and south Yemeni states united in 1990.
The UN’s Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay has also condemned the air strike and called for an investigation into the deadly attack, which was the second government air strike resulting in civilian deaths in the space of three days.
“The government should launch a full-fledged investigation into what went wrong and take immediate measures to try to ensure we do not see a further avoidable tragedy of this nature,” Pillay said.
In an effort to crush Zaidi Shia fighters, led by Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, the Yemeni government launched a military operation on the northern Saada and Amran provinces on August 11.
The offensive has left over 50,000 civilians displaced and UN aid agencies have repeatedly warned that the conditions for the civilian population caught in the conflict zone continue to deteriorate.
—–Agencies