Category: Yemen

Photo An airstrike hit the presidential palace, also known as the Republican Palace, in the southwestern city of Taiz, Yemen. The United Nations said 18 out of the country’s 22 provinces have been hit by airstrikes. Credit Reuters GENEVA — International aid agencies expressed rising alarm Friday over the humanitarian disaster consuming Yemen , as airstrikes and street fighting have intensified and nearly paralyzed essential services. Air assaults by the Saudi-led coalition struck Sana, Yemen’s capital, on Thursday night and Friday, said Cedric Schweizer, head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Sana. According to the United Nations, 18 of Yemen’s 22 provinces now have been hit by airstrikes, in which an American-backed alliance of Arab states led by the Saudis has been bombing the Houthis, a northern Yemen militia organization supported by Iran . The Houthis and their allies in Yemen’s armed forces have […]

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Photo People salvaged items from a government bank that was hit by an airstrike Thursday in the northern Yemeni province of Saada. Credit Reuters DOWAAN, Yemen — Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen took control of a major airport and an oil export terminal in the southern part of the country on Thursday, expanding the resurgent militant group’s reach just two weeks after it seized the nearby city of Al Mukalla and emptied its bank and prison. Local officials said that fighters belonging to the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula , also known as AQAP, took control of the Riyan Airport and a nearby military base outside Al Mukalla, the fifth-largest city in Yemen . The group also seized the Dhabah oil terminal on the Arabian Sea coast, which the group had tried to capture before, according to Yemeni officials. Al Qaeda is capitalizing on the expanding multisided […]

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LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Worsening violence in Yemen has made almost half the country’s population "food insecure", with flour shortages, closed shops and disrupted supply routes driving up food prices, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Thursday. The agency says someone is food insecure if they lack "all-time access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life". It estimates 12 million Yemenis are in this category today, up from 10.6 million last year. The United Nations says the conflict in Yemen has killed 600 people, wounded 2,200 and displaced 100,000 since Houthi rebels allied with Iran seized the capital Sanaa in September. The rebels now control most of Yemen and their advance toward the southern port of Aden triggered air strikes by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia to try to drive them back. People face a shortage of wheat flour, […]

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WASHINGTON—Yemen’s civil conflict and the U.S.’s emerging nuclear deal with Iran are sowing divisions among the Obama administration’s key Arab allies and placing the White House in the cross hairs. The strains flared publicly on Wednesday when the Shiite leader of Iraq, a U.S. ally, accused another American ally, Sunni Saudi Arabia, of threatening a regional sectarian war by launching airstrikes against Iranian-backed insurgents in Yemen. In Washington on Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the Saudi airstrikes made no sense and urged world leaders to quickly forge a cease-fire in Yemen, where the United Nations has voiced concerns about a growing humanitarian crisis. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Washington on Tuesday. “To me, there is no logic to the operation at all in the first place,” Mr. Abadi said during his first official visit to the U.S. since taking office in September. “What is the aim? […]

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Violence in Yemen forces liquified natural gas company to halt operations at facility at industrial port city of Balhaf. File Photo by Anees Mahyoub/UPI. SANAA, Yemen, April 14 (UPI) — Declining security in Yemen means it’s time to halt all production and start evacuating personnel, a Yemeni liquefied natural gas company said Tuesday. "Due to further degradation of the security situation in the vicinity of [the industrial port town of] Balhaf, Yemen LNG has decided to stop all LNG producing and exporting operations and start evacuation of the site personnel," the company said in a statement. The company has headquarters in the capital, Sanaa, which was seized by the Houthi rebel group earlier this year. Yemen’s recent crises stem in part from the political upheavals that grew out of the Arab Spring movements that gripped much of the Middle East and North African in 2011. A Saudi-led operation, Decisive […]

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ADEN/DUBAI (Reuters) – Three weeks of fighting across Yemen may be pushing a country where Sunnis and Shi’ites have prayed in the same mosques for centuries toward a sectarian war. Most combatants deny they are motivated by religion in the conflict. Iran-allied Shi’ite Houthi rebels say they are leading a just revolution and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia contends it has been bombing the Houthis to protect the Yemeni state. Militiamen from the south cite defence of their homeland. But there are signs that the sectarian hatred that has engulfed the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 is creeping into Yemen’s war, fueled by a rivalry between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran. Conflict and power struggles are not new to Yemen, one of the most heavily armed societies in the world. But the sectarian trend was captured on a video shared by Yemeni Facebook users. A teenager sits […]

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BAGHDAD — Under pressure from American officials here, Iraq has withdrawn Shiite militiamen from the Ramadi area in Anbar Province, and the American-led coalition immediately responded by stepping up bombing raids to support Iraqi forces battling extremists of the Islamic State there, according to Iraqi officials involved in the decision. The American ambassador, Stuart E. Jones, met Saturday with Anbar tribal leaders and provincial officials and expressed his dissatisfaction that Shiite militiamen were in the thick of a local offensive against the Islamic State near the Anbar provincial capital, according to two participants in the meeting, interviewed Sunday. He warned that unless the militias were withdrawn, the United States would not be able to launch airstrikes to support the Iraqi forces there. Anbar Province is a Sunni area, and the tribes who live there have largely opposed the use of Shiite militias in the area, a position the United […]

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LONDON (Reuters) – International shipping lines are being forced to scale back or suspend port calls to Yemen as the conflict gets worse, putting pressure on supplies of food as prices rise in local markets. Yemen imports more than 90 percent of its food, including most of its wheat and all its rice, to feed a population of 25 million. Much of its needs had been serviced by foreign ships. Saudi Arabia and Arab allies have launched air strikes against the Iran-allied Houthi movement, which has taken most of the country and forced President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh. The coalition has deployed naval vessels to intercept ships carrying arms to the rebels, although merchant ships are meant to have free passage. Most ports appear to be under Houthi control or are disputed by combatants. Many shipping companies are now unwilling to risk their vessels, industry sources […]

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Photo The rubble of a house destroyed by an airstrike in Bait Rejal, a village west of the capital, Sana. Credit Khaled Abdullah/Reuters CAIRO — The United States said on Tuesday that it was expediting deliveries of weapons to Saudi Arabia , a sign of the Obama administration’s deepening involvement in the Saudi military offensive against the Houthi movement in Yemen . Speaking to reporters in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, Antony J. Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, said the United States had also increased its intelligence sharing and established a “joint coordination planning cell” with the Saudi government to help its war effort, according to the Reuters news agency. The show of support by the United States came two weeks after the Saudi military launched an air war against the Houthis, members of a rebel movement from northern Yemen that has seized territory and steadily expanded its influence […]

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