Yemeni Ansurullah Forces Have Shot Down Eight $150 Million American MQ-9 Reaper Drones
Middle East , Aircraft and Anti-Aircraft
Yemeni Ansurullah Coalition forces have shot down an eighth American MQ-9 Reaper drone, almost eleven months after the outbreak of hostilities with U.S. forces.
“An American MQ-9 drone was shot down while carrying out enemy missions in the skies over Marib province. This drone was the eighth aircraft of this type shot down during the battle and holy jihad in support of Gaza," Yemeni sources reported.
Earlier the coalition’s leader Abdul Malik Al Houthi threatened to expand attacks on Israel and Western countries, stressing that "enemies will be caught off guard on land just as they were caught off guard at sea with the help of new technologies that will help to harm them."
Al Houthi further stated that the his forces were coming close to mounting a response to the Israeli bombing of the port of Hodeidah in western Yemen, which was struck on July 20 in response to the Ansuruallh Coalition’s successful drone strike on the centre of Tel Aviv the previous day.
The U.S. Navy has notably struggled to suppression the Yemeni coalition’s fighting strength despite close to ten months of operations and well over a billion dollars in expenditures, including the use of costly anti ballistic missiles in considerable quantities to intercept Yemeni strikes.
Ansurullah Coalition forces have in the past released footage showing the shootdowns of MQ-9 Reaper drones, with American sources having in the past disputed whether the aircraft were operating within Yemeni airspace when targeted.
Reapers are operated by the U.S. Air Force and the Marine Corps, with some units having also been operated by NASA and the CIA. Ansurullah’s forces have achieved multiple kills against enemy aircraft since the outbreak of war in Yemen in 2015, including multiple Royal Saudi Air Force F-15 and Tornado fighters, multiple Apache attack helicopters, Moroccan and Bahraini F-16s, a Sudanese Air Force Su-24 strike fighter, and American and UAE MQ-1 drones, among other assets in 2015-2018 alone.
Reaper drones have formed the backbone of American air operations across multiple theatres, and have been involved in multiple encounters with Russian aircraft based in Syria, with one such encounter seeing a drone damaged by a Su-35 fighter. They have also been involved in operations against Russia in the Black Sea, and in exercises targeting Chinese forces in the South China Sea.
The aircraft cost approximately $150 million each including associated maintenance infrastructure, spare parts, training, armaments and subsystems.
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