Dubai: The Saudi-led coalition fighting to restore the rule of internationally recognised government of Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi on Tuesday struck Al Houthi positions across the border from the Saudi city of Najran.
The strikes came following the killing of five Saudi border guards in Najran on Monday in a firefight with armed fighters trying to infiltrate the border into Saudi Arabia.
In a separate incident, two Saudi pilots died when their Apache helicopter crashed inside Yemen.
The five were killed in eight hours of fighting when the Saudis confronted “enemy elements of armed groups who tried to infiltrate in several places” in the Najran area, the official SPA news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying.
It said the frontier guards backed by the country’s army thwarted the attempts to cross the border which began at 3.00 GMT (7am UAE time). A day earlier, the kingdom’s air defence forces shot down a ballistic missile fired from Yemen toward Najran.
According to regional media, the UAE forces stationed in Najran on Tuesday fired artillery shots at hideouts belonging to the Al Houthi group and targeted their movements across the border from Saudi Arabia. Coalition war planes also targeted Al Hasama and Al Sahaar on the border, amid reports about dozens of casualties among militia fighters in the border area.
Southern Saudi Arabia, especially border areas with Yemen, have come under sporadic attacks since Riyadh took the lead in March 2015 in an Arab military coalition battling Al Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen.
On Monday evening, the coalition said two Saudi officers were killed when their Apache helicopter crashed in Yemen because of bad weather.
They said the aircraft went down in Marib province east of the rebel-held capital Sana’a.
The rebels claimed to have shot down an Apache between Maarib and the southern Saudi region of Jizan, their media said.
Earlier on Monday, a rebel spokesman said the rebels had fired a ballistic missile at a military camp in Jizan, causing casualties and material damage.
Yemeni military sources, meanwhile, reported heavy fighting since Thursday on the Yemeni side of the border between loyalist forces and rebels.
They said five days of fighting in northwestern Yemen have killed 82 people, including 48 rebels.
Around 100 members of the Saudi forces and civilians have been killed in skirmishes, by artillery fire or landmines inside the kingdom’s borders since the coalition launched its campaign.
More than 6,400 Yemenis, most of them civilians, have been killed since last March, and the fighting has driven 2.8 million Yemenis from their homes.
Kuwait has hosted Yemen peace talks since April, but the negotiations have failed to make any progress and the Gulf emirate on Thursday gave the warring parties a 15-day ultimatum to strike a deal or leave the country.
— With inputs from agencies
