Reuters/Riyadh
Saudi Arabian forces have made repeated small incursions across the border with Yemen in response to attacks since the start of air strikes against Houthi forces on March 26, the Saudi-led coalition said yesterday.
Attacks on Saudi border positions by the Houthis or their allies, army units loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, have increased since coalition-backed forces regained control of Aden last month and advanced northwards.
“Sometimes you have to move and not be static on your defensive line. You move, find where the attack comes from, find the target. It happens from time to time but is not significant,” coalition spokesman Brigadier Ahmed Assiri said.
Over a dozen Saudi soldiers and border guards have been killed in shelling, fighting or missile attacks on the frontier since the air strikes began, while coalition jets have caused hundreds of Houthi casualties, Assiri has previously said.
The kingdom fought a brief border war with the Houthis in 2009-10, in which both sides briefly took control of patches of each other’s territory. Riyadh accuses the group of acting on behalf of Iran, which it and Tehran both deny.
“We don’t have the intention to go deep across the Yemeni border, but sometimes because of difficult terrain, mountains or caves where they can hide, we have to find their positions, clear them and then get back to our positions,” he said in a telephone interview.
Such incursions are made as responses to Houthi attacks on Saudi frontier positions and typically go only a hundred or so metres into Yemeni territory, but have gone “to a maximum of one or two kilometres” he said.
More than 4,300 people have been killed in five months of war in Yemen while disease and suffering in the already impoverished country have spread.
Militias and army units loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, currently taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, have made significant advances toward the Houthi-controlled capital in the last two months but the group remains ensconced in Yemen’s north and casualties mount in nationwide combat every day.
An air strike by warplanes from the coalition, which said it targeted a bomb-making factory, killed 36 civilians working at a bottling plant in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah yesterday, residents said.
“The process of recovering the bodies is finished now. The corpses of 36 workers, many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant this morning,” resident Issa Ahmed said by phone from the site in Hajjah.
Coalition spokesman Assiri denied the strike had hit a civilian target, saying it was a location used by the Houthis to make improvised explosive devices and to train African migrants whom they had forced to take up arms.
“We got very accurate information about this position and attacked it. It is not a bottling factory,” he said.
He accused the Houthis of using African migrants, stuck in Yemen after arriving by sea before the war in the hope of crossing the Saudi border and finding work in the kingdom, as cannon fodder in dangerous border operations.
Also yesterday, a bomb exploded near the vacated US embassy in Sanaa and unknown gunmen shot and killed a senior security official in the southern port city of Aden.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility, but Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - the deadliest branch of the global militant organisation - has been attacking the Yemeni state and plotting against Western targets for years.
A powerful bomb detonated in front of a gate on the wall surrounding the embassy around midnight yesterday but claimed no casualties, residents and officials said.
The United States and other Western countries closed their missions in Yemen in February as the political feud between the Houthis and the Hadi government led to war.
The Houthi-run state news agency Saba quoted a security official calling it a “terrorist and criminal act”.
In Aden, the local director of security, Colonel Abdul Hakim Snaidi, was shot dead outside his home by gunmen in a passing car, a security official said.
His death is the first such killing of a senior security official since the city was recaptured by pro-Hadi militiamen in July. Since then, a power vacuum has grown, with Al Qaeda militants moving into a main neighbourhood last week and unknown assailants blowing up the intelligence headquarters.
