Dubai: Yemeni government forces on Sunday were in the midst of a fresh offensive east of the Yemeni capital Sana’a on Saturday, the military command said, after United Nations-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait ended without an agreement.
Iran-backed Al Houthis and Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC), hold most of Yemen’s northern half, while forces loyal to the internationally-recognised Yemeni president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi share control of the rest of the country with local tribes.
The fighting in which more than 6,400 people have been killed, half of them civilians, has created a humanitarian crisis in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East.
Al Qaida and its militant rival Daesh have exploited the war to try to recruit more followers and establish roots in the country, which controls major shipping lanes overlooking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
A Saudi-led Arab coalition said that the Yemeni army and allied local tribesmen, backed by Arab coalition air strikes, began a major operation to “liberate the district of Nehem east of Sana’a”.
The area is a key route to the capital, which has been under Houthi control since 2014.
“The army and the resistance have managed to liberate a number of important military positions that had been controlled by the coup militias, most prominent of which is the Manara mount which overlooks the centre of Nehem district,” the agency quoted a military spokesman as saying.
Fighting was also reported on the Yemeni-Saudi border, where a Saudi border guard was killed by fire directed from the Yemeni side, the Saudi state news agency SPA said, citing a security spokesman.
A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition accused Al Houthis of escalating attacks along the border, where the alliance had scaled back its military operations to give the Yemeni peace talks a chance to succeed.
“The militias began military operations along the border after the suspension of the Yemeni consultations,” the spokesman, General Ahmad Assiri, told the Saudi-owned Al Hadath television, referring to Al Houthis. “Al Houthi militias are trying to achieve gains on the ground to make up for political losses,” he added.
The comments came after the UN special envoy, Esmail Ould Shaikh Ahmad announced that talks in Kuwait had been adjourned, promising they would resume at an unspecified venue within a month.
“We will leave Kuwait today, but peace consultations will continue. We will let the parties consult their leaders,” he told a news conference.
Earlier in Sana’a, Al Houthi-backed media news sites published the names of 10 officials it said would be on a political committee to run the country. The parties would rotate the position of president and vice president, who would be chosen from within the committee, the statement said.
