Yemeni rebels launch Saudi border attacks
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Yemen’s Shiite rebels attacked Saudi border posts, sparking fierce fighting overnight that killed three Saudi troops and dozens of rebels, the kingdom said. Saudi-led airstrikes continued to bomb rebel positions inside Yemen on Friday, including a strike in the capital, Sanaa, that killed at least 20 civilians.
The attack late Thursday by the rebels, known as Houthis, was the most dramatic border incident since Saudi Arabia launched an intense campaign of airstrikes against the rebels just more than a month ago. It also brought to 11 the number of Saudi soldiers killed so far in border skirmishes during the air campaign.
The assault underscored how the Iran-backed Houthis are still capable of launching major operations despite the airstrikes that have relentlessly targeted their positions and those of their allies — military units loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudi-led offensive, which started March 26, aims to diminish the military capabilities of the Houthis, who have overrun Sanaa and are advancing deep into the country’s south.
The United Nations says at least 550 civilians have been killed so far in the conflict, which has turned into a kind of proxy war between Yemen’s powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Yemen’s internationally recognized President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled the country in March, is now based in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, along with most of his government. There have been recent calls by officials in exile for a Saudi-led ground invasion to restore Mr. Hadi’s government to power. “There must be a direct military intervention … to stop Saleh and the Houthis,” Yemen’s Transportation Minister Mohammed Badr Bassalma told Al-Arabiya satellite TV on Friday.
The Saudi-led coalition continued to pound rebel positions Friday. One airstrike targeted a house of a top Houthi rebel commander in Sanaa, killing at least 20 civilians, including 10 women and children, officials and witnesses told an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
In the southern port city of Aden — Mr. Hadi’s base before he fled to Riyadh— and in the city of Taiz, warplanes bombed positions of the Houthis and Mr. Saleh’s forces, killing scores of fighters, according to security officials. At least 12 people were killed Friday because of ground fighting in Aden, according to medical officials.
In the border attack, Houthi fighters in tanks and armored vehicles struck “border posts and control points” in the southern Saudi region of Najran on Thursday night, the kingdom’s Defense Ministry said. Saudi forces, backed by fighter jets, repelled the attack.
The Houthis managed to take several scattered Saudi villages in the southern border region of Jizan in 2009, during the kingdom’s last war with the rebels.