A protected 2,500-year-old cultural heritage site in Yemen’s capital was obliterated in an explosion early on Friday, with witnesses and news reports saying the cause was a missile or bomb from a Saudi Arabian warplane. The Saudi military denied responsibility.
The top UN official for safeguarding antiquities condemned the destruction of ancient homes, towers and gardens, which also allegedly killed an unspecified number of residents in al-Qasimi, a neighborhood in Sana’a’s Old City area.
“I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives, as well as the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said.
“I am shocked by the images of these magnificent many-story tower-houses and serene gardens reduced to rubble,” she said in a statement posted on the UNESCO Web site, calling on all antagonists in Yemen’s conflict to respect the nation’s cultural treasures.
“This heritage bears the soul of the Yemeni people; it is a symbol of a millennial history of knowledge and it belongs to all humankind,” Bokova said.
Photographs from the scene and witness accounts posted on social media said the attack destroyed at least five houses and caused irreparable damage to the area, registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The UNESCO statement said the damaged area in Sana’a’s Old City had been inhabited for more than 2,500 years and “bears witness to the wealth and beauty of the Islamic civilization.”
It was considered a major center for the propagation of Islam after the religion’s beginnings in the seventh century.
Yemeni news agency Saba reported that the Old City boasted more than 100 mosques, 14 public baths and more than 6,000 houses built before the 11th century.
A coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen, the Middle East’s most impoverished country, for more than two months in a concerted campaign against the Houthi insurgent group, which is allied with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.
Hours after the destruction in Sana’a’s Old City, there were conflicting accounts of the precise cause. Saba asserted — without attribution — that a “Saudi bombing raid” had been responsible and that at least six people had been killed.
Saudi-led coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assiri was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the coalition did not carry out an attack and suggested that a rebel ammunition storehouse might have exploded.
Houthi fighters quoted by local news outlets denied having anything to do with the destruction.
Saudi Arabia has said its strikes are aimed only at military targets.
However, the WHO said that more than 2,500 people have been killed and more than 11,000 wounded in the two-month campaign, amid fears that the nation of 25 million is verging on collapse, with an estimated 80 percent of the population in need of humanitarian aid.
The destruction in Sana’a came a few days before peace talks sponsored by the UN are to be convened in Geneva, Switzerland.
Destruction of cultural antiquities in the Middle East has now become an integral part of the mayhem convulsing the region.
Islamic State insurgents in Syria and Iraq have flaunted their vandalism of treasured archaeological sites and historically important relics in recent months.
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