Agencies/Sanaa
Yemeni army units allied to the Houthi militia fired a ballistic missile toward southern Saudi Arabia yesterday but the Saudi military said it intercepted it and retaliated with air strikes on Yemeni territory.
Residents in Yemen’s capital Sanaa reported hearing a big roar as the Scud was launched from near the city, followed by Saudi-led air strikes on a presidential palace and a military depot for rockets.
Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman, a spokesman for the Yemeni forces fighting alongside the Houthis, said the missile was aimed at an electricity station in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province.
The strike was a response to the Saudi air strikes in Yemen, he told Saba, Yemen’s Houthi-controlled state news agency.
The Saudi military said in a statement it intercepted the missile, averting any damage, and directed air attacks against the source of fire in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia led an Arab military intervention against the Houthis beginning on March 26 to restore the Yemeni government ousted by the group and fend off what it sees as the creeping influence of the Shia group’s main ally, Iran.
A powerful Cold War-era weapon, the Scud had been launched at Saudi Arabia by Yemeni forces twice before during the five-month war but was shot down by American-provided Patriot missiles both times.
Two Saudi soldiers and a brigadier general were killed this week in border fighting along the kingdom’s long frontier with northern Yemen, a heartland of the Houthis.
Earlier yesterday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television reported that Saudi troops had pushed several kilometres inside the Houthis’ stronghold of Saada near the border with Saudi Arabia.
But a spokesman for the coalition, Ahmed Assiri, downplayed the action.
“It is a tactical move, which implies no territorial ambitions,” he said. “This work has been going on since the start of operations.”
He said that yesterday’s action was aimed at preventing the Houthis and their allies from taking positions near the Saudi border.
Meanwhile, journalists based in Saada said that allied warplanes mounted a series of strikes in the province, from which the Houthis hail.
An exchange of shelling was raging between Saudi forces and the Houthis on the border, they reported without giving casualties.
The Houthis have seized large parts of Yemen in recent months in a power struggle against President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Last month, Saudi-backed militias loyal to Hadi regained control of the southern city of Aden, in the biggest setback for the rebels.
The pro-government forces have since regained ground from the rebels in southern and central Yemen.
Al Qaeda militants yesterday blew up an army headquarters and set up checkpoints in the militant network’s southeastern stronghold of Mukalla, officials in Hadramout province said.
The militants had deployed in force across Mukalla after receiving information of a possible operation by the Saudi-led coalition to help government loyalists retake the provincial capital, the officials said.
The coalition has so far not intervened against Al Qaeda.
Yesterday’s explosion flattened the three-storey army building—the command centre for a zone covering Hadramout and parts of neighbouring Shabwa province.
