A militant loyal to Yemen’s government reads the Qur’an yesterday as he stands in front of the presidential palace, destroyed during recent fighting in Aden.
Agencies/Aden
President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi yesterday urged Shia rebels to lay down their arms and resume dialogue to end Yemen’s conflict, as he left for the UN General Assembly.
The embattled leader, who returned on Wednesday to the southern city of Aden after a nearly six-month exile, headed to New York where he is to address the General Assembly.
“I am open to all efforts seeking a political solution,” Hadi said in a letter addressed to King Salman of Saudi Arabia, where the Yemeni leader took shelter in March after rebels advanced on Aden, his last refuge at the time after having escaped house arrest in Houthi-controlled Sanaa.
Hadi also called on rebels “to end their coup, surrender weapons ... and return to the dialogue table, to implement the UN Security Council Resolution 2216”, which demands the insurgents withdraw from territories they have occupied.
The rebels overran Sanaa unopposed in September last year and went on to expand their control zone into several regions, aided in fierce fighting against pro-Hadi forces by renegade troops loyal to ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
In July, loyalist forces backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition evicted the rebels from Aden and four other southern provinces, and they have since set their sights on advancing on Sanaa.
In a letter to Hadi, King Salman congratulated Hadi on his return to Aden and pledged support to the internationally-recognised president.
“We in the coalition stand firmly, with all our strength, by your side... to protect your country,” Salman wrote.
The United Nations says nearly 4,900 people, including a vast number of civilians, have been killed in Yemen’s conflict since late March.
Residents and medics said air strikes by helicopters flying from Saudi Arabia killed 30 civilians in a Yemeni village yesterday, but Saudi authorities dismissed the accounts as “totally false”.
Apache helicopters fired rockets at the village of Bani Zela in Hajjah province, 10km from the Saudi border, killing at least 25 civilians, the residents and medics said.
The helicopters returned for a second strike as residents and medical teams were trying to evacuate casualties, killing three medics and two more civilians, they said.
Yemen’s Saba news agency, run by the Houthis, put the death toll at 28 and said 17 others were injured, some seriously.
A Saudi official said the coalition had played no role in any attack in the area.
“This is totally false news. We deny it,” the official, who declined to be identified, said, adding that no coalition helicopters operated so far from the border.
On Saturday Saudi Arabia announced that a brigadier general died in hospital of wounds suffered in an incident on the border with Yemen.
Ibrahim Omar Ibrahim Hamzi, deputy commander of the 8th brigade in Saudi Arabia’s southern Jizan province, was injured “defending the nation and its citizens”, the statement said, without providing details.
His death follows the killing of two border officers along the frontier on Saturday.
About 100 Saudi military personnel, including another general, have been killed along the border with Yemen since the Saudi-led campaign began in March.
In the latest fighting, coalition air strikes pounded suspected Houthi targets in the capital around 25 times, residents said, and hit several other central provinces.
Gulf troops and allied Yemeni tribesmen were fighting ground battles against militiamen and their allies in Yemen’s army in the desert province of Marib 120km east of Sanaa yesterday.
