Tribal gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi carry the body of a comrade who was killed in the southern city of Taez during clashes with Houthi rebels yesterday.`
Reuters
Aden/Cairo
Yemen’s Houthi militia battled its way into Aden’s Tawahi district yesterday despite Saudi-led air strikes, strengthening its hold on the city whose fate is seen as crucial to determining the country’s civil war.
The fighting across Yemen killed 120 people yesterday, mostly civilians, including at least 40 who were trying to flee the southern port city of Aden by a boat that was struck by Houthi shells, rescue workers and witnesses said.
The Houthis and ex-army forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh have besieged Aden for weeks in an effort to end resistance in the city where President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi briefly based his government before fleeing to Saudi Arabia.
Hadi’s Foreign Minister Riyadh Yassin appealed for the international community to intervene to stop the Houthi assault on Aden in a televised news conference from Riyadh.
Insisting that the city had not fallen, he described the militia as “the killers of men and children” and said Aden’s residents had appealed to Saudi Arabia for help “in the name of the brotherhood of blood and religion”.
Locals said the Houthis had penetrated the historic district of Al Tawahi, where the presidential palace, main port and Aden television station are located. Fighting still raged, they said.
Saudi Arabia has led an Arab coalition in strikes aimed at restoring Hadi’s government.
Coalition jets have bombarded the Houthis and Saleh’s forces in and around Aden, have dropped supplies for local allies, and have deployed there Yemeni soldiers who were retrained in Gulf states, it has said.
Meanwhile, in Yemen’s far north, coalition air strikes killed 43 civilians, Houthi sources said, following the death of five Saudi civilians on Tuesday in mortar and rocket fire, the first such deaths in the kingdom since the campaign began on March 26.
More than 30 air strikes hit Saada province and there was heavy artillery fire from across the border, local sources said.
The figure could not be independently verified.
The conflict has disrupted imports to Yemen, where about 20mn people or 80% of the population are estimated to be going hungry, a statement by the United Nations and the Yemen International NGO Forum said.
A shortage of fuel has crippled hospitals and food supplies in recent weeks, and the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has said its fuel needs have leapt from 40,000 litres a month to 1mn litres.
Responding to an announcement by the Saudi alliance of a possible truce in some areas to allow for humanitarian supplies, the WFP said a permanent end to hostilities was needed.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday that Washington was concerned about the dire humanitarian situation and pledged $68mn for relief work in the country.
He told journalists in Djibouti that he would discuss a possible pause in fighting with Saudi officials later in the day to try to get food, fuel and medicine to civilians
“We have urged all sides to comply with humanitarian law to take every precaution to keep civilians out of the line of fire,” he said.
