Saudi Arabia warns the UN of an "oil slick" near a ship in Yemen

In a letter addressed to the United Nations Security Council, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the UN, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, wrote that the experts had observed that "a pipeline connected to the ship is suspected of having separated from the stabilisers that hold it to the bottom and is now floating on the surface of the sea", as reported by Reuters.

Saudi Arabia warned that it had seen an "oil slick" in an area of sea traffic 50 kilometres west of a rotting oil tanker that threatened to spill 1.1 million barrels of crude oil off the coast of Yemen.

The tanker referred to by the ambassador is Safer, which has been stranded off the Ras Issa oil terminal in Yemen's Red Sea for more than five years. The United Nations warned that the ship could spill four times more oil than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska, which spilled 37,000 tons of oil, making it one of the worst ecological tragedies in Alaska's history.

In the letter, Al-Mouallimi described how the oil tanker "has reached a critical state of degradation and that the situation is a serious threat to all Red Sea countries, particularly Yemen and Saudi Arabia" and added that "this dangerous situation must not be left unaddressed".
The United Nations has been waiting for formal authorisation from the Yemeni Houthis movement to send a mission to the Safer and carry out a technical assessment and any initial repairs that are feasible. Both the SC and UN Secretary General António Guterres have asked the Hutus to allow access to the ship.

During his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, King Salman bin Abdulaziz expressed his concern for the integrity of Saudi Arabia's borders and assured that he will not cease to defend its national security, nor will he abandon his neighbour until it regains full sovereignty and independence, "we will continue to support the efforts of the UN envoy to Yemen", said the monarch.

Since 2014, Yemen has been embroiled in a bloody civil war and has become the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with more than 24 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. The international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, also known as the Arab Coalition, supports the Al-Hadi faction against the Houthis front.

The United Nations has described Yemen as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with 80 percent of the 30 million inhabitants in need of assistance. The conflict is rooted in the failure of political transitions that were to bring stability to the country following the Arab Spring that forced its former authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to hand over power to his deputy, Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi in 2011.

It was finally in 2014 that the conflict broke out. The Houthis movement carried out a coup d'état against the government of the capital, led by Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi. A year later, the intervention of the international coalition, consisting mainly of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, intensified a year later with the intervention of the Arab coalition, consisting mainly of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.