AMERICA WITHDREW its remaining 100 special forces troops from Yemen yesterday, in a sign of the rapid unravelling of a country that on Friday was hit by one of its worst terrorist attacks.
The US soldiers left their base near Al-Houta, after alQaeda seized the city.
The commandos, including Green Berets and Navy Seals, had been training Yemeni military forces in counterterrorism operations, but the Americans have not been involved in direct ground combat manoeuvres against militants.
Sources told NBC News that the US Special Operations Forces were based in remote areas of Yemen and considered relatively secure from enemy threats. But one source said that with this week’s deadly surge in sectarian violence, evacuating American commandos made sense.
“The threat is too high,” the source said. “Why take the risk?”
Washington closed its embassy on February 11, followed a day later by Britain and France. The state department said the decision had
Locals and members of the Houthi militia examine the scene of one of Friday’s suicide bomb attacks on Shia mosques in Sana’a. Above, a boy wounded in the blasts recovers in hospital, and the aftermath inside one of the mosques
been made because of “the uncertain security situation in Sana’a.”
Yemen has been hurtling towards civil war since last year, when the Houthis, who belong to a sect derived from Shia Islam, advanced from their northern heartland, tak- ing over the capital Sana’a and nine of the country’s 21 provinces over the past six months, and raising fears of a civil war. Friday’s triple bomb blasts, which killed 150 and injured 351, were claimed by a splinter group of fighters from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), marking a worrying escalation in the conflict between the Shia Houthis and the Sunni forces of Isil and alQaeda.
Yesterday, the country’s embattled president, Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled Sana’a last month, pledged to take on the Houthis and remove Iranian influence in the country. He accused the Houthis of importing Tehran’s ideology.
He also addressed the leader of the rebels, Abdel-Malik alHouthi, telling him to stop trying to trick the Yemeni peo- ple. In a letter to relations of the victims of the mosque bombings, Mr Hadi condemned the attacks as “terrorist, criminal and cowardly”.
“Such heinous attacks could only be done by the enemies of life,” who want to drag Yemen into “chaos, violence and said.
“Shia extremism, represented by the armed Houthi militia, and Sunni extremism, represented by al-Qaeda, are two sides of the same coin, who do not wish good and stability for Yemen and its
internal
fighting,”
he people.” Last week, it was announced by the Houthi-run news agency that Iran had signed a deal to supply Yemen with crude oil for a year and to build a new power plant.
Saudi Arabia, Iran’s archrival in the Gulf, is a strong backer of Mr Hadi.