NCRI Staff
NCRI – The Yemeni government on Tuesday, January 16, without mentioning a name, accused some organizations of the Iranian regime of trying to forge the Yemeni national currency and, consequently, collapse of its value.
According to al-Arabiya, the Yemeni government has expressed the view that the aim of this measure is to increase the suffering of the Yemeni people by “using the human condition as a mean to force the international community to stop military action against Houthi militants”.
Yemen’s spokesman Rajeh Badi said: “Iran’s plan is to protect Houthi militias as a hand tool to save its failed project, a project which is at its final stages due to successive field defeats imposed by the Yemeni army with the brotherly support of the Saudi-led Arab coalition.”
Badi also pointed to the “plundering of $5 billion from the Yemen’s reserve fund by Houthi militias” and the “seizure of 2 trillion Yemeni rials present in the banks.”
He added that the Houthis use this large amount of the local money to change the currency exchange rate and withdraw foreign money from the market, which adds to the severity of the fall in the value of the Yemeni currency.
In the past days, the Yemeni currency reached the lowest level in its history. The price per dollar exceeded 500 Yemeni rials, while it was about 215 rials before the Houthi coup d’état against the legal government. As a result, the Yemeni currency lost more than half its value, putting a huge impact on prices and leading to unprecedented inflation.
The spokesman for the Yemeni government stressed that the government has put exceptional efforts in place to “settle all solutions” in order to stop the “unacceptable” fall of the national currency.
The US Treasury Department added to its sanctions list last November a network of companies and staff of the Iranian regime’s revolutionary guards corps (IRGC) and terrorist Quds Force on charges of forging money in Yemen worth millions of dollars.