Dozens killed in Yemen as allies turn on each other Fighting within Saudi-led coalition sparks warning of ‘civil war within a civil war’

Clashes between Yemeni forces that had been fighting on the same side of the country’s civil war have killed up to 40 people, threatening to further complicate efforts to end a conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

On Saturday, southern secessionist forces, which have been backed by the United Arab Emirates, seized the presidential palace in the port city of Aden from troops loyal to Yemen’s Saudi-backed government.

Both sets of fighters have been part of a Saudi-led coalition battling Iran-aligned rebels in Yemen’s four-year conflict, but the Aden clashes “threaten to tip southern Yemen into a civil war within a civil war”, said Crisis Group, a think-tank.

Saudi Arabia led the militarily intervention in Yemen in March 2015 after Houthi rebels took control of Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. The conflict has morphed into a proxy war as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, its main coalition partner, accuse Iran of supplying

weapons to the Houthis, who control the populous north.

The Saudi-led coalition has backed numerous militias and factions in its battle against the Houthis as the conflict has killed more than 10,000 people and pushed about 10m to the brink of famine.

The UN said in a statement on Sunday that as many as 40 people had been killed in the fighting in Aden and 260 wounded. “We are also very worried by reports that civilians trapped in their homes are running out of food and water,” said Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Yemen.

The Uae-backed secessionists have also taken control of other government buildings and military bases, effectively putting them in control of Aden, which had been the temporary seat of President Abd-rabbu Mansour Hadi’s administration.

The secessionists, led by the Southern Transitional Council, want an independent south Yemen and have been demanding to be involved in Un-backed peace talks to end the conflict. The south was independent until it united with the north in 1990.

Saudi Arabia has called on the transitional council’s forces to withdraw from the positions they seized in Aden and urged the rival factions to hold talks in the kingdom. But there were reports that the Saudi-led coalition launched attacks against the secessionists on Sunday.

Peter Salisbury, an analyst at Crisis Group, said the fighting was the result of Yemeni forces “leveraging external support to achieve internal goals”. But he added that from a Saudi perspective “it’s hard to see how it doesn’t feel like a humiliation and it undermines the coalition”.

“The Saudis and Emiratis have been able to walk this line since the beginning of the conflict where neither is particularly happy with who the other depends on to provide them military weight on the ground. As long as the primary goal of the coalition was to fight the Houthis they were able to paper over the cracks,” he said.

“But the Emirati position has clearly been that there is no more war to fight and what’s needed is a political conclusion to the conflict. From that point onwards, the fragile detente between the Uae-backed and Saudi-backed forces was always going to be shaky.”