At least 14 people were killed in Sanaa on the night of Monday January 17 to Tuesday January 18, during raids by the Saudi-led military coalition in response to a deadly attack by Yemeni rebels in the United Arab Emirates.
The coalition – of which the Emirates is a member – which has been fighting Yemeni insurgents since 2015, has multiplied since Monday evening the retaliatory raids on the capital of Yemen, controlled by the Houthi rebels.
Residents of the capital cleared the rubble on Tuesday, with the hope of finding survivors in the rubble, while two buildings were blown up by the raids.
The rebels, for their part, announced the death of a general, Abdallah Qassem Al-Jounaid, director of the faculty of aviation and air defense. This manager was killed “with members of his family, a heinous crime committed by the air force of the aggressor [la coalition], who targeted his home on Monday evening”, according to the rebels’ news agency, SABA.
The coalition, which had threatened on Monday to “fight back” in action “terrorist” Yemeni rebels, launched new strikes on the capital on Tuesday, saying it was targeting “Houthi camps and headquarters”, tweeted the Saudi public television channel Al-Ekhbariya.
The Houthis claimed on Monday on their channel, Al-Massira, to have “targeted important and sensitive Emirati facilities and sites” using ballistic missiles and drones. In Abu Dhabi, three tank trucks exploded “near storage tanks” of the oil company of the city, resulting in the death of two Indian nationals and a Pakistani, had, for its part, indicated Monday the official Emirati agency WAM, reporting six wounded.
The rebel attack has opened a new front in the war in Yemen and further dims hopes for a settlement of the conflict, which has displaced millions of people in what was already the peninsula’s poorest country Arabic.
The coalition intervenes in Yemen to support government forces against the rebels, who seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014. According to the UN, the conflict has claimed 377,000 lives, direct and indirect victims of a war that lasted for more than seven years.