SALEH SHOT DEAD AFTER HOUTHIS AMBUSH CAR
On Saturday, fighters loyal to Saleh appeared to have gained the upper hand, with some political analysts predicting the city would fall completely to them within hours. But the following day the Houthis began to dramatically reverse their gains.
As news broke of Saleh’s death yesterday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Yemen, Jamie McGoldrick, called for a pause in the fighting in Sanaa, noting that dozens of people had been killed and hundreds injured, including civilians.
Aid organisations were receiving desperate calls for help from families trapped in neighbourhoods surrounded by fighting, he said.
Mr Hadi, Yemen’s president, ordered his forces to retake the capital from the Houthis, an official from his office said.
“The president has ordered vice president Ali Mohsen Al Ahmar, who is in Marib [east of Sanaa], to activate military units and advance towards the capital.”
Mr Al Sharafi, the a member of Saleh’s party, said they would co-ordinate with the “legitimate authority represented by the legitimate president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi” and called on military commanders from the renegade Republican Guard, which is loyal to Saleh, to rejoin the Yemeni army and help to liberate the capital.
Mansoor Saleh, a Yemeni political analyst and a spokesman for the secessionist Southern
Transitional Council, said this was the only choice left open to military commanders aligned with the party.
“Many of the GPC commanders were killed with Saleh and the rebels will not give Saleh loyalists a chance to capture their breath,” Mr Saleh said. “They will keep filtering Sanaa of them.”
The analyst noted that Saleh, with whom all of the party’s power had been concentrated, had not assigned a successor, and that he didn’t think the party or its leaders would be able to recover.
Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al Houthi, meanwhile, hailed the death of his former ally, congratulating Yemenis “on this historic, exceptional and great day in which the conspiracy of betrayal and treason failed”.
But he said his movement would not pursue a vendetta against Saleh’s party.
“The problem is not with the General People’s Congress as a party or with its members,” Mr Al Houthi said.
Yesterday Abdullah Saleh, a resident of Sanaa’s southern Al Sabaeen district, said the Houthis had stormed the homes of Saleh loyalists in the neighbourhoods of Hadah and Beet Bous, and besieged the homes of sheikhs close to the former president.
Local journalist Raafat Al Yarrisi said the Houthis had arrested several commanders of the Republican Guard, which is led by Saleh’s nephew, Col Tariq Abdullah Saleh.
Al Yarrisi said they had targeted media outlets associated with the former president, including the television channel for which he works, Yemen Today, which was owned by Saleh.
“They stormed the TV channel and Al Yemen Al Youm newspaper headquarters, and they arrested some of my colleagues and started storming our residences,” he said.
Before Sunday night, he said Republican Guard soldiers had been in control of most of the capital’s streets and the rebel-run government headquarters, but that the Houthis had made dramatic gains in recent hours.
“Suddenly we were told that the Houthis are besieging Hadah, which is considered a stronghold for the General People’s Congress party and Saleh’s loyalists,” Al Yarrisi said.
The rebels “started shelling the channel’s headquarters”, he said.
“In that critical moment I and my colleagues headed to evacuate our families from Hadah. I decided to flee to Al Dhalaa province in the south of the country.”
The Houthis had also stormed the TV channel and Al Yemen Al Youm newspaper headquarters