Yemen violence erupts amid unraveling of rebel alliance
SANAA, Yemen — Snipers took over rooftops in residential areas, tanks deployed and militiamen set up checkpoints Sunday across the Yemeni capital, where fighting forced families to hunker down indoors in anticipation of more violence.
Five days of bombings and heavy gunfire have underscored the unraveling of the already fragile alliance between Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Shiite rebels known as Houthis. The two sides joined ranks in 2015 and swept across the capital, Sanaa, forcing the country’s internationally recognized president to flee the country and seek military intervention led by Saudi Arabia.
Also Sunday, the United Arab Emirates denied a claim by the Houthis that they fired a missile toward an Emirati nuclear plant under construction.
After months of political and military stalemate, the street battles between Saleh’s forces and the Houthi militiamen have marked a turning point in the conflict. The two sides had been enemies before the war that began when Saleh was president. Their alliance, in the eyes of many Yemenis, was doomed to fail given their stark differences.
The Iran-backed rebels perceive themselves as a religious awakening movement, while Saleh is a pragmatic politician, shifting political alliances, buying tribal loyalties and exploiting Yemen’s power fault lines throughout his three-decades in power before he was ousted after the country’s Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Over 48 hours, all of Yemen’s political players spoke about turning a new page and unifying against the Houthis — a new alliance that appeared to have been in the making for some time as the Shiite rebels have accused Saleh of working against them.
The Houthis, who descended from their northern enclave and seized Yemen’s capital in 2014 with the help of Saleh’s forces, are now becoming isolated in the face of popular anger.
Pictures of angry Yemenis in Sanna tearing down posters of the Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, flooded social media as street fighting there appeared to split the capital in two, with northern areas under Houthi control and southern ones under Saleh’s fighters.
Clashes between fighters loyal to Saleh and the Houthis first erupted last week when Saleh accused the rebels of storming his mosque in Sanaa and attacking his nephew, the powerful commander of the special forces, Tarek Saleh.
Yemen’s President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who is in Saudi Arabia in self-imposed exile, appeared to extend an offer of reconciliation to his predecessor, Saleh. In a statement, Hadi said his side would support “any party confronting Houthi terrorist gangs.”