Riyadh: The Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) in Yemen has said that it has investigated allegations on human-rights violations against the Saudi-led coalition fighting a war in Yemen and found out that the coalition is not responsible for most of them, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
The JIAT is an investigation mechanism created by the coalition to investigate possible human rights violations in its military operations in Yemen, a country that has been locked in a brutal civil war since 2014.
The JIAT said allegations of an attack targeting a house in Taiz Governorate in Yemen in 2015 are wrong as the team found that the coalition did not carry any airstrikes in the area, Xinhua news agency reported.
The closest military target the coalition struck at the time was 18.5 km away from the house in question, said JIAT spokesperson Mansour Al-Mansour.
The JIAT also denied the coalition’s accountability for an attack on a health center in Yemen’s Saada Governorate in 2015.
Moreover, the team refuted a statement by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator that the coalition conducted an airstrike in Al-Jawf city in 2020, killing a number of civilians.
The forces of the coalition were “correct” in procedures to attack a vehicle and two buildings of the Houthi militia during the airstrike as local intelligence indicated that no civilians were inside, which turned out to be otherwise.
The JIAT recommended prosecuting the field commander who provided the inaccurate information, adding the coalition would provide assistance for the civilian victims.
The outcomes of the investigations were announced on the same day as the launch of the Yemeni talks in Riyadh. The talks, supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council, will continue until April 7 to find a political solution to the Yemeni crisis.
Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthi militia seized control of several northern provinces and forced the Saudi-backed Yemeni government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.
The Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015 in the Yemeni civil war in an attempt to reinstate the Hadi government. The coalition has carried out thousands of airstrikes, killing tens of thousands of people, according to the United Nations.
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