Al Mukalla: Thousands of government employees inside rebel-controlled Sana’a have received months of unpaid salaries after the internationally recognised government in Aden transferred the money through a local exchange company, state-run media said on Wednesday.
Public servants in the liberated provinces or Al Houthi-held ones have not been paid their salaries since September when president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi ordered relocating the central bank from Al Houthi-held Sana’a to Aden to put an end to Al Houthis’ plundering of the monetary authority’s reserves.
Al Houthis responded by cutting off salaries, driving Hadi’s government into assuring the public that it would pay all public servants who were added to the payroll before Al Houthis’ coup in late 2014.
This week, the government sent two cheques worth hundreds of millions of rials to the Sana’a-based Al Kurimi Exchange Company in order to to pay the government salaries in Sana’a. Government employees in other Al Houthi-held provinces are expected to receive their salaries through the same company in the coming days, the government said in a statement carried by the sate-run Saba news agency. The government has recently announced the end of a chronic cash crunch after the arrival of billions of rials in cash printed in Russia.
Army officials loyal to Hadi said on Thursday that their forces are still battling pockets of Al Houthis snipers inside the strategic port town of Mocha, a signal to rebel forces’ determination to maintain their control over the town.
On Monday, top military officers announced liberating the Red Sea town after heavy clashes with Al Houthis backed by renegade army units loyal to the ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Local journalists embedded with the army said there were barred from visiting the liberated city, citing the presence of Al Houthi snipers and landmines. The town is famous for its ancient seaport from which the rebels are said to be smuggling Iranian arms into the country. Heavy clashes also erupted on Thursday in the northern provinces of Jawf and Hajja where the Saudi-led coalition warplanes struck Al Houthis military sites and reinforcements, according to Yemen army official page of Facebook.
In the province of Marib, unidentified gunmen assassinated a senior security official from the province of Ibb on Thursday, a local security official told Gulf News. The men opened fire at Colonel Abdul Wahab Al Sha’alan, the chief security of Ibb province, while having his hair cut at a barbershop in Marib downtown.
