Within 5 years, a British company sold 15 billion pounds to Saudi Arabia

British newspaper "The Guardian" reported that the British "BAE Systems" company for manufacturing weapons sold to Saudi Arabia more than 15 billion pounds in arms and services attached to it in the last five years, the same period in which Riyadh began leading a coalition of several countries to enter the Yemen war .

The newspaper stated that the annual government report of the British company’s sales revealed that it had achieved revenues exceeding 2.5 billion pounds of arms sales to the Saudi army in the past year alone.

The Guardian indicated that these sales come at a time when thousands of civilians were killed by air attacks launched by the Saudi-Emirati coalition aircraft in Yemen, after Riyadh obtained weapons from BAE Systems and other Western companies.

The third customer and
the Saudi army is the third largest customer for the sales of "BAE Systems", after the US Department of Defense and its British counterpart, and a spokesman for the company says that all the equipment, training and support that the company provides to the Saudi authorities is done with the approval and supervision of the British government.

"We have seen in the last five years a hideous humanitarian crisis in which the Yemeni people live, but BAE Systems has continued its business at a regular pace," said Andrew Smith, head of the Coalition Against Arms Trade, adding that the Yemen war continued "because of the arms companies continuing to export and support governments Colluding with those companies. "

The Saudi Air Force is accused of responsibility for the deaths of 12,000 six hundred Yemenis in raids on sites inside Yemeni territory since the start of the coalition's military intervention.

There has been widespread criticism inside Britain of its arms sales to Riyadh since the war in Yemen began in 2015, and despite that successive governments in Britain continued to support the continued sale of weapons to the Saudi army, despite evidence of civilian casualties in the air strikes launched by the Riyadh-led coalition in Yemen.

British arms sales to Saudi Arabia were halted in the summer of 2019 following a British court ruling that there was no formal evaluation by the London authorities to see if the Saudi-led coalition committed violations of international humanitarian law during its operations in Yemen, but the British government appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court in The country ruled in favor of the government.