Saudi Officers Trained in UK After Coalition's Intervention in Yemen - Reports

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - UK military colleges trained several dozens of Saudi officers after the start of Riyadh-led intervention in Yemen, which has been widely criticized over violations of humanitarian law and civilian casualties, the Guardian newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The number of Saudi cadets trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Royal Air Force's school at Cranwell and the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth since 2015 amounted to 43, including 12 officers who arrived for training in 2018, the newspaper said, citing UK Defense Ministry's answer to its freedom of information request.

According to the newspaper, Labour lawmaker Lloyd Russell-Moyle described the revelations as "the tip of the iceberg of British enablement of the Saudi war machine to devastate the people of Yemen."

According to most recent figures from the UK Department of International Trade released in late March, the United Kingdom sold at least 5.7 billion pounds ($7.45 billion) worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen since the start of the war in 2015.

Anti-arms groups have repeatedly criticized the United Kingdom for delivering arms to Saudi Arabia, stressing that it made London complicit in Riyadh's human rights abuses, and called on the government to halt arms supplies to Gulf states.

READ MORE: Saudi Coalition Will Strike Anything to ‘Win The War' in Yemen, Even Civilians

The Saudi-led coalition has been engaged in the civil war in Yemen since March 2015, when it started to carry out airstrikes against the Houthi armed rebels at the request of Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

The Yemeni civil war has claimed over 7,000 lives, while over 20 million people in Yemen are currently in need of humanitarian assistance, according to UN estimates.