Clashes in south Yemen kill six civilians

ADEN: Clashes between Yemeni security forces and gunmen in the southern city of Aden on Tuesday left six civilians dead, a security official said.

The fighting erupted when security forces stormed a house in the Omar al Mukhtar neighbourhood and arrested a man suspected of being a member of the IS fighter group, the official said.

Shortly after the operation, unidentified gunmen from the district attacked a checkpoint, triggering clashes that lasted for around three hours.

Three other civilians were wounded in the gunfight, the official said.

Aden serves as a temporary base for the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi as the capital Sanaa has been held by Ansar Allah since September 2014.

Despite several security campaigns, government forces in Aden appear to have failed to flush out fighters who have taken advantage of the war with the Huthis to expand their presence.

Hadi, who is based in Riyadh, has occasionally visited the port city since loyalists backed by a coalition pushed the Ansar Allah rebels out of the city and four southern provinces in the summer of 2015.

Hadi fled Aden in March 2015 as the rebels closed in on his refuge, prompting a military intervention by the coalition. More than 8,000 people have been killed in the past two years and tens of thousands wounded in the war in Yemen, according to the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, cholera has killed 1,170 people in war-ravaged Yemen and the number of suspected cases is now at nearly 2,000 a day, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

And the devastation wrought by the conflict there made coping with the outbreak that much more difficult, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told reporters in Geneva.

“The number of suspected cholera cases is rising,” said Jasarevic.

“We are talking close to 2,000 suspected cases per day,” he warned, which meant that Yemen was now suffering the world’s largest cholera outbreak.

Since WHO began collecting data on the outbreak on April 27, it has registered more than 170,000 suspected cholera cases across 20 of Yemen’s 21 governorates, Jasarevic said.

WHO has warned that a quarter of a million people could fall sick with the disease cholera by the end of the year there. Already, two-thirds of the population are on the brink of famine there.

Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection spread through contaminated food or water. The disease is easily treatable, but reining it in conflict-torn Yemen is particularly difficult.