Sana’a: Nine people have been killed in sectarian fighting that was ongoing on Friday in northern Yemen between Houthi rebels and Salafist Islamists backed by local tribes, a tribal source said.

Al Houthi rebels have been battling the Sana’a government for nearly a decade in the remote Saada province, but the outbreak of fighting with Salafist militants has deepened the sectarian dimension of the unrest.

“Seven Houthis and two tribesmen were killed on Thursday in the clashes, which were continuing intermittently,” particularly in the Kitaf area in the north of Saada and in neighbouring Amran province, the source told AFP.

The source did not say when the men had died.

A spokesman for the Salafists, Khalid Al Azzani, confirmed the toll to AFP.

An official from the Al Houthi Ansar Allah (Partisans of God) group, Ali Al Bakheeti, said the clashes in Amran had left dead and wounded, without elaborating.

Fighting erupted in late October in the Saada town of Dammaj, home to a Salafist mosque and Quranic school for Sunni preachers, reportedly after an attack by Al Houthi rebels on one of their mosques.

Al Houthis, named after their late leader Abdul Malek Al Houthi, are part of the Zaidi Shiite community.

They rose up in 2004 against the government of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, accusing it of marginalising them politically and economically.

They accuse radical Sunni Salafists in Dammaj of turning the town centre into “a real barracks for thousands of armed foreigners”, a reference to the Dar Al Hadith Quranic school, where foreigners study.

Heavily armed tribes in the area have deployed forces in Saada and neighbouring provinces to try to loosen the Al Houthis’ stranglehold on Saada.

It has not been possible to compile a precise toll for the fighting, as the region is virtually inaccessible to journalists.

Azzani said on Friday that the Salafist camp had suffered “180 dead, including 23 children and four women, and 510 wounded”.

“Among the dead there are foreign students, originally from the Maghreb, Europe, France and America,” he said without giving further details.

He called the situation in Dammaj “tragic”, accusing Al Houthis of bombarding the town with heavy weapons.

Bakheeti, however, described the violence as a “tribal, and not a sectarian, war as it is presented by the Salafists”.