Airstrikes hit Yemen port
Human rights groups condemn civilian casualties
Fighters loyal to Yemen's exiled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi stand guard outside the gate leading to the government building in Yemen’s third-largest city Taez.
Zaid al-Alayaa and Laura King
SANAA, Yemen — Warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition Tuesday struck a rebel-held port that has been a key gateway for aid entering battered Yemen, even as a major human rights group declared that some of the mounting civilian casualties in the nearly five-month conflict probably amounted to war crimes.
Fighting also raged Tuesday in the central city of Taiz, seen as the last main obstacle to forces loyal to the internationally recognized government pushing north to strike at the capital, Sanaa. Shiite Muslim Houthi rebels have been entrenched in Sanaa for nearly a year, and a struggle between heavily armed combatants within its confines would be expected to take a heavy civilian toll.
Civilian deaths and injuries came under scrutiny in a new report by London-based Amnesty International, which cited a “gruesome and bloody trail of death and destruction” in cities including Taiz and Aden, the southern port recently wrested from the Houthis by forces loyal to President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.
The Saudi-led coalition’s self-declared aim is Hadi’s reinstatement after he was forced to flee Yemen early this year.
However, international organizations have repeatedly pointed to the conflict’s horrifying cost in human suffering in what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. The fighting has killed more than 4,300 people, about half of them thought to be civilians.
Amnesty International blamed all sides for causing the killing and maiming of noncombatants, but focused its latest investigation on eight coalition airstrikes in and near Taiz and Aden that it said had killed 141 civilians, children among them, and ground fighting that killed an additional 68 noncombatants.
Civilians “have found themselves trapped in a deadly crossfire between Houthi loyalists and antiHouthi groups on the ground, while facing the persistent threat of coalition airstrikes from the sky,” said Donatella Rovera, the rights group’s senior crisis response adviser.
“All the parties to this conflict have displayed a ruthless and wanton disregard for the safety of civilians.”
In addition to growing numbers of people left dead and injured by combat, the conflict has been marked by the spread of rampant hunger and disease as crucial infrastructure is smashed and only small amounts of humanitarian aid are able to enter the country.
Tuesday’s airstrikes on the Red Sea port of Hodeida, about 90 miles southwest of Sanaa, destroyed or damaged storage hangars, cargo containers, loading cranes, docking facilities and at least one vessel, officials and witnesses said.