Thread: Arabs plan to send 40,000 troops to subdue Iranian backed rebellion in Yemen

Arabs plan to send 40,000 troops to subdue Iranian backed rebellion in Yemen

Washington Post:

Yemeni warplane fleet destroyed in raids, Saudis say

Analysts said three days of strikes by Saudi-led coalition warplanes could pave the way for a potential land invasion even as Egypt announced that a joint Arab military of 40,000 will be created.

Neither the war planes or the fleet were responsible for the Houthis takeover. It was basically a general uprising that swelled into numerical superiority over the existing Yemeni forces. Subduing that up rising is going to take several thousand troops and probably a counter insurgency operations once they are subdued. That requires an adequate force to space ration to control the movement to contact.

The number of troops will also depend somewhat on the amount of support the Houstis get from Iran.

Imagine how dangerous that support could be when Iran gets nuclear weapons under the deal being negotiated in Switzerland. That is exactly why the Saudis are considering getting their own nuclear weapon. At a minimum they would want the same glide path Iran has.

http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/20...troops-to.html

I think that we're mainly concerned about al Qaeda in the south. We've been using drones there.

Of curse, nuclear proliferation is always a concern.
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Sat Mar 28, 2015 5:12am IST

Yemen Houthi rebels advance despite Saudi-led air strikes

ADEN | BY MOHAMMED MUKHASHEF

(Reuters) - Yemen's Houthi rebels made broad gains in the country's south and east on Friday despite a second day of Saudi-led air strikes meant to check the Iranian-backed militia's efforts to overthrow President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Shi'ite Muslim Houthi fighters and allied army units gained their first foothold on Yemen's Arabian Sea coast by seizing the port of Shaqra 100km (60 miles) east of Aden, residents told Reuters.

Explosions and crackles of small gunfire rang out across Aden late on Friday as Houthis made a push on the southern port city's airport, a witness said.

The advances threaten Hadi's last refuge in Yemen and potentially undermine the air campaign to support him.

The spokesman for the Saudi-led operation, Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, told a press conference in Riyadh that defending the Aden government was the campaign's "main objective".

"The operation will continue as long as there is a need for it to continue," Asseri said.

Warplanes targeted Houthi forces controlling Yemen's capital Sanaa and their northern heartland on Friday. Asseri said that planes from the United Arab Emirates had carried out their first strikes in the past 24 hours.

In a boost for Saudi Arabia, Morocco said it would join the rapidly assembled Sunni Muslim coalition against the Houthis. Pakistan, named by Saudi Arabia as a partner, said it had made no decision on whether to contribute.

REGIONAL CONTEST
Riyadh’s military intervention is the latest front in a growing regional contest for power with Iran that is also playing out in Syria, where Tehran backs Assad’s government against mainly Sunni rebels, and Iraq, where Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias are playing a major role in fighting.

Sunni monarchies in the Gulf are backing Hadi and his fellow Sunnis in the country's south against the Shi'ite advance.
Yemen's powerful ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose military units fight alongside the Houthis, called on Friday for a cessation of hostilities by both sides, according to a statement carried by his party's website.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yaseen said the air campaign could end within days.

He said the door was still open for dialogue with the Houthis, while in a Facebook posting, Hadi urged Yemenis to be patient and predicted the Houthis would soon be gone.

But the Houthis and allied army units seized the southern town of Shaqra in Abyan province on Friday, gaining access to the Arabian Sea, residents said.

Their entry into the city means they control most land routes to Aden and can block tribal fighters trying to come in to reinforce Hadi's troops.

Residents said dozens of pickup trucks loaded with tribal fighters have reached the town of Mudyah and were expected to clash with the Houthi forces based in Shaqra and the town of Lodar.

During a week of intense fighting, the Houthis have taken the Red Sea port of al-Mukha to Aden's northwest, and the city's northern outskirts, suggesting Aden is danger, despite the air strikes against the Houthis.

Eyewitnesses in Sanaa said Houthi fighters and allied military units were re-positioning some anti-aircraft units at police stations in some neighbourhoods, causing panic among residents, who fear they will become targets for air strikes. Residents said aircraft targeted bases around Sanaa of Republican Guards allied to the Houthis, and also struck near a military installation that houses missiles. The Houthi-controlled Saba news agency put the death toll in Sanaa at 24 and said 43 were wounded and 14 houses were destroyed.
Houthi-run al-Masirah television also said 15 people were killed in an air strike on a market in the northern city of Saada.

OIL REGION HIT
The Republican Guards are loyal to Saleh, who retains wide power despite having left office in 2012 after mass protests.
Earlier air strikes south of the city and in the oil-producing Marib region appeared to target military installations also affiliated with Saleh.

Warplanes also hit two districts in the Houthis' northerly home province of Saada, tribal sources said.

The coalition began air strikes on Thursday to try to roll back Houthi gains and shore up Hadi, who has been holed up in Aden after fleeing Sanaa in February.

Hadi left Aden on Thursday to attend an Arab summit in Egypt on Saturday, where he aims to build support for the air strikes.
In his first reaction to the attacks, Houthi leader Abdel-Malek al-Houthi on Thursday called Saudi Arabia a bad neighbour and "Satan's horn", saying in a televised speech Yemenis would confront the "criminal, unjust and unjustified aggression".

Mosques in Riyadh on Friday preached fiery sermons against the Houthis and their Iranian allies, describing the fight as a religious duty. Saudi Arabia's top clerical council gave its blessing to the campaign.

In the Iranian capital Tehran, Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Kazem Sadeghi described the attacks as "an aggression and interference in Yemen’s internal affairs".

Iran has denounced the assault on the Houthis and demanded an immediate halt to Saudi-led military operations.

While U.S. officials have downplayed the scope of the ties between Iran and the Houthis, Saudi ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir said members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Iranian-backed Hezbollah are on the ground advising the Houthis.

The Saudi military spokesman said there were no plans at this stage for ground force operations, but if the need arose, Saudi and allied ground forces would repel "any aggression."

http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/0...edName=topNews

More than 500 killed in two weeks of violence in Yemen, tens of thousands fleeing homes

Published April 02, 2015 Associated Press

• FILE - In this Thursday, March 26, 2015 file photo, people carry the body of a child they uncovered from under the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes near Sanaa Airport, Yemen. In just the first four days of fighting in Yemen, at least 62 children were killed by airstrikes or in clashes, UNICEF says, just one sign of the humanitarian damage being wreaked by the conflict in a country already gutted by years of chaos.(AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File) (The Associated Press)

CAIRO – The U.N. humanitarian chief says an estimated 519 people have been killed the past two weeks in Yemen's violence, many of them civilians and 90 of them children.

The deaths come as Saudi Arabia and its allies launched an air campaign on March 25 in support of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and his loyalists against Shiite rebels. Hadi's loyalists have been battling the rebels for weeks on the ground.

In a statement Thursday, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos, expresses concern "for the safety of civilians caught in the middle."

She says some 519 people have been killed and 1,700 wounded, many of them civilians, the past two weeks. Among the dead were 90 children. She says tens of thousands have fled their homes.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/04...sands-fleeing/

Fri Apr 3, 2015 2:58pm EDT Related: WORLD, YEMEN

Yemeni fighters repel Houthis in Aden after arms drop

ADEN | BY MOHAMMAD MUKHASHAF

Militants loyal to Yemen's President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi man a checkpoint on a street in the country's southern port city of Aden March 30, 2015.
REUTERS/ANEES MANSOUR

(Reuters) - Fighters loyal to Yemen's president pushed Houthi fighters back from central Aden on Friday after they were reinforced with weapons parachuted into their beleaguered section of the southern port city by Saudi-led warplanes.

The military setback for the Shi'ite Houthis came after days of advances in Aden, the last major foothold of fighters loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, despite a week-old Saudi campaign of air strikes to halt the Houthis and bolster Hadi.

Sunni Muslim power Saudi Arabia, alarmed by the Iranian-allied Houthis' march on Hadi's powerbase in Aden, launched its air campaign nine days ago along with regional backers.

The intervention marks Riyadh's most assertive move yet to counter what it sees as a spread of Shi'ite Iran's power in the region, a proxy struggle also playing out in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Aden residents said the Houthi fighters and their allies withdrew from the central Crater district as well as one of Hadi's presidential residences which they took 24 hours earlier.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, said the logistical support airdropped at dawn on Friday had helped turn the tide for Hadi's fighters.

"They received the support and they were able to change the situation on the ground, driving the Houthi militias out of the palace and the areas that they had briefly taken control of," he told a news briefing in Riyadh.

The crates of light weapons, telecommunications equipment and rocket-propelled grenades were parachuted into Aden's Tawahi district, on the far end of the Aden peninsula which is still held by Hadi loyalists, fighters told Reuters.

RELATED COVERAGE

• › Suspected al Qaeda fighters seize military base in east Yemen
• › Turkish Navy evacuates 55 citizens from Yemen, foreign minister on Twitter
• › Pakistan PM concerned by overthrow of Yemen government, stands by Saudi Arabia
• › Turkey wants political solution in Yemen, but supports Saudi-led operation

The Houthis, fighting alongside soldiers loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, emerged as the strongest force in Yemen after they took over the capital Sanaa in September.

After they turned on Aden last week, Hadi fled abroad and has watched from Riyadh while his remaining authority has eroded.

Turmoil in the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country comes after year of separatism, tribal conflict, sectarian violence and an insurgency by al Qaeda militants targeted by U.S. drones.

GROUND TROOPS OPTION
Local militia forces said they killed 10 Houthis during the fighting which pushed the Shi'ite movement out of Crater. They also said Houthis killed two medics and two patients when they opened fire on an ambulance ferrying casualties from Aden's peninsula to hospital on the mainland.

It was not possible to verify the reports independently.

The coalition, trying to reassert Hadi's standing before any political settlement, has said that sending ground troops into Yemen remains an option.

Officials have declined to say whether special forces have already deployed. Saudi ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir said on Thursday the kingdom does not have "formal" troops on the ground in Aden.

Tribal sources in Yemen said on Friday that Saudi Arabia had started to remove parts of a fence along its border with the northwestern Yemeni provinces of Saada and Hajja.

This could be a prelude to an incursion by ground troops, but may also be part of more modest efforts to secure the frontier area, which on some stretches includes a buffer zone between the two countries.

Saudi Arabia's Ekbariya television said two border guards were killed in an attack after dusk on Friday near Dhahran. It gave no details.

U.S. government sources said on Thursday that, although Washington believes Saudi Arabia and its allies have deployed a military force along the border which is large enough to launch a full-scale invasion, there was no indication that Riyadh was planning such a move soon.

ARMY BASE
The U.N. relief coordinator Valerie Amos said 519 people have been killed in the fighting in the past two weeks and nearly 1,700 wounded, without specifying whether those figures included combatants.

The fighting has forced Washington to evacuate military personnel from Yemen, a main battlefield in its drone war against al Qaeda.

Suspected al Qaeda fighters stormed a military base in the port town of Mukalla, killing at least five soldiers and ransacking its ammunition store, residents said.

The attack came a day after the militants broke into Mukalla jail and freed scores of prisoners including a prominent local al Qaeda leader, identified by officials as Khaled Batarfi.

The Sunni Islamist al Qaeda fighters are ideologically fiercely opposed the Houthis, who are drawn from a Zaidi Shi'ite minority, but coalition spokesman Asseri said it was Houthi fighters who broke open the jail in an effort to sow chaos.

Al Qaeda and the Houthis "have the same objective, they are in the same trench against the Yemeni population", he said.

Former ruler Saleh is a member of the Zaidi sect who fought to crush the Houthis as president but has now allied himself with them. Street protests in 2011 linked to wider Arab uprisings forced him to step down in favor of Hadi.

In an interview with an Egyptian newspaper published on Friday, Saleh described the Saudi-led air strikes as unjustified aggression and called on Arab states such as Egypt, Algeria or Oman to "stop this senseless war against the rights of people".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/...0MU0KU20150403

http://www.alipac.us/f19/china-evacu...-yemen-318646/

Senior Yemeni Sunni leaders abducted by rebels

Published April 05, 2015 Associated Press

SANAA, Yemen – A Yemeni Islamist Sunni political party says two of its senior leaders were among over a hundred members abducted by its rival — the Shiite rebel group being targeted by a Saudi-led airstrike campaign to thwart its aggressive bid for power.

The Islah party, the Muslim Brotherhood's branch in Yemen, said in a statement Sunday that the rebels, known as Houthis, along with allied security forces loyal to the ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh, have carried out a number of overnight raids arresting leading members Mohammed Qahtan and Hassan al-Yaeri, along with more than 120 others.

Islah, a traditional power player in Yemen and a staunch rival of the Houthis, had declared its support for the Saudi-led coalition bombing campaign against the Houthis, now in its 11th day.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/04...ted-by-rebels/

Kenya launches airstrikes against militants in Somalia

John Bacon, USA TODAY5:41 p.m. EDT April 6, 2015

The Kenyan military says it launched air strikes against Islamic militants in Somalia following an extremist attack on a Kenyan college that killed 148 people. Wochit


(Photo: Khalil Senosi, AP)

Kenyan jets blasted two Islamic militant camps across the border in Somalia on Monday in retaliation for the terror attack last week that killed 148 people and left Kenya enveloped in shock, pain and mourning.

The Somalia-based al-Shabab militant group has taken responsibility for the attack Thursday at Garissa University College. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had threatened to retaliate "in the severest way possible" against the al-Qaeda-linked militants for Thursday's attack.

"We bombed two Shabab camps in the Gedo region," Kenyan army spokesman David Obonyo told AFP. "The two targets were hit and taken out. The two camps are destroyed.

"The bombings are part of the continued process, and engagement against Al-Shabab, which will go on,"

No casualty reports related to the airstrikes were immediately released. Ali Hussein, a resident of Gabdon, a village near the Somali border, said the airstrikes appeared to strike grassland used by nomads to graze their animals.

"We are not aware of any military camps located there," he told the Associated Press.



The Kenyan government claims Abdirahim Abdullahi, the son of a local official, orchestrated the terrorist attack that killed 147 people Thursday. Video provided by Newsy Newslook


Across Kenya, somber friends and relatives continued the arduous task of identifying the often mangled bodies of victims of Thursday's attack. Beatrice Musungu was overcome with grief and anger when she saw the body of her cousin, university student Oliver Maina, in a mortuary.

"These people are inhuman," she told The Standard. "They destroyed life that they did not create. My cousin was humble. I cannot believe that terrorists have taken away the life of such a humble soul."

Survivors of the Garissa attack said the four gunmen lined up non-Muslims and executed them. The siege ended when security forces stormed the school, near the Somali border, and killed the gunmen.

Kenya is a Christian-dominated nation of 45 million people. The vast majority of war-torn Somalia's 10 million people are Muslim.

Al-Shabab said the attack was a reprisal for Kenyan efforts to put down the Islamic insurgency in Somalia. Al-Shabab leaders have warned of a "long, gruesome war" unless Kenya withdrew its troops from Somalia.



USA TODAY
Kenyan lawyer among terrorists killed in school attack


Kenya has repeatedly struck militant bases in southern Somalia since 2011. Kenya also has joined the African Union force fighting the insurgency. On Monday, Garissa Township officials and National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale called for closure of Somali refugee camps in Kenya, saying they were being used to plan attacks against Kenyans.

More than 300,000 Somalis live in the camps, which Duale told the Daily Nation have become centers for assembling and training terror networks. Duale said the United Nations refugee agency can relocate the camps across the border.

The government also is offering a $220,00 reward for the capture of Mohamed Mohamud, also known as Gamadhere, accused of masterminding the Garissa attack. Gamadhere, a Somalian, is a former teacher at an Islamic religious school — called madrassas — in Northern Kenya.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...alia/25349183/

Preparing ground invasion of Yemen, Saudi military to raze some 100 border towns

By Thomas Gaist
7 April 2015

Saudi Arabian military forces participating in the US-backed war against Yemen will raze to the ground nearly 100 villages along the Yemen-Saudi border, according to reports in Saudi media Monday.

The mass demolitions are part of the preparations by Saudi Arabia to expand its ongoing air campaign into a full-scale ground invasion of its impoverished neighbor to the south.

Saturday marked the 11th day of a Saudi-led bombing campaign pounding the country, with concentrated strikes against targets around Aden and the northern city of Saada.

Strikes launched by the Saudis and allied forces from the Persian Gulf monarchies, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, as well as from Jordan, Egypt and Sudan, continued to pound the capital of Sanaa over the weekend.

Saudi special forces are already on the ground inside Yemen, according to some reports. Saudi Arabia demanded this weekend that Pakistan join the “Arab coalition” and supply military aid in advance of a ground invasion.

At least 500 are dead and 1,700 wounded as a result of the fighting that has raged across the Saudi-Yemeni border and throughout the interior of the country. The streets of Aden are “strewn with dead bodies,” and freshly wounded residents are flooding local medical centers, according to the Red Cross. Nearly 200 civilians have been killed and more than 1,200 wounded in Aden in the past 10 days, according to a local health official cited by the BBC.

The Red Cross has called for a 24-hour “humanitarian pause” in the fighting and the Saudi blockade of Yemen, which the agency said was necessary to prevent further mass deaths of civilians.
The breakdown of Yemen’s sanitation infrastructure under the impact of the Saudi air war threatens a devastating public health crisis, experts warn. Medical programs, including immunization programs for children, have been disrupted by severe supply shortages. Much of Aden has been without water and electricity for days, according to Reuters.
“Many, many” children have been killed since the Saudi-led assault began, according to UNICEF’s Yemen representative. Reports are emerging of mass recruitment of children into rival militias.
There is a widespread understanding that Yemen is being rapidly transformed into a slaughterhouse. Numerous governments scrambled to evacuate their citizens from Yemen over the weekend, in anticipation of further escalation of the violence, with Pakistan evacuating some 170 nationals by air on this weekend, Algeria evacuating 160, Jordan 150, Egypt 380, India 440, and Turkey rescuing some 230 of its nationals.
As Yemen’s cities and towns face bombardment from the air, the country is being torn apart by clashes between warring tribal-based militias that have stepped into the void produced by the collapse of the US puppet government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. Installed by the US and Saudi-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council in early 2012, Hadi is currently in exile in Saudi Arabia after being deposed at gunpoint by Houthi forces in the opening weeks of 2015.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other sectarian militant forces, meanwhile, have expanded their control over substantial areas, seizing entire towns and springing hundreds of imprisoned fighters from government jails.
The Houthi rebels now control territory in the northwest and the south and along the strategically critical western coastline, and are engaged in a chaotic civil war with AQAP fighters and other militant groups that effectively control areas along the southern coast.
AQAP captured the city of al Mukalla on Friday, forcing government forces to flee their fortifications and abandon their US-made weapons. It is becoming clear that the group is seen by Saudi Arabia as a critical fighting force against the Houthis.
Previously, AQAP’s activities were invoked as the pretext for US intervention and military presence in Yemen, with AQAP constituting one of the main targets of Washington’s drone warfare. Now, the group may soon be fighting on behalf of the Saudi coalition, and thus effectively on behalf of Washington.
The Saudi monarchy seeks to maintain power over the impoverished Saudi and Middle Eastern working classes through a counterrevolutionary and sectarian strategy that includes the violent suppression of Shia minorities both inside and along its borders, making the extreme-right Sunni militants of AQAP all the more attractive as potential allies against the Iran-linked Houthis.
Nonetheless, the efforts of Western media to try to portray the conflict as driven primarily by a sectarian struggle of Sunni versus Shia are calculated to cover over the fundamental responsibility of the US government and ruling elite for the rising tide of war in Yemen and throughout the broader region.
Far from the product of medieval religious disputes, as the self-proclaimed pundits of the US media establishment contend, the accelerating destruction of Yemen has been waged in close coordination with the US and with direct US logistical support and weaponry and flows directly from the efforts of US imperialism to maintain political domination over the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf through endless wars and militarist conspiracies.
In an analysis posted in late March, “America, Saudi Arabia, and the Strategic Importance of Yemen,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) drew out the geopolitical considerations behind the war against Yemen.
Because the new Yemen war involves essential US global interests, the Pentagon must prepare to provide direct “combat support” for the Saudi-led war, Cordesman argued.
“US strategic interests require a broad level of stability in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula,” the CSIS chief, who serves as unofficial foreign policy advisor to the White House, noted.
“Yemen is of major strategic importance to the United States, as is the broader stability of Saudi Arabia and all of the Arab Gulf states. For all of the talk of U.S. energy ‘independence,’ the reality remains very different. The increase in petroleum and alternative fuels outside the Gulf has not changed its vital strategic importance to the global and U.S. economy,” Cordesman wrote.
Cordesman’s point is that historic oil surpluses do not free the US from the need to control the strategic reserves and shipping channels of the region, levers of global power that are essential to US domination over the main European and Asian powers.
Yemen’s proximity to two of the most important commercial waterways on the planet, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Straits of Hormuz, make it a linchpin of US regional strategy. Traffic exiting the Persian Gulf must cross through Bab el-Mandeb, which is less than 20 miles across with only two shipping lanes at its narrowest point, before reaching the Suez Canal and SUMED pipeline.
“The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, and it is a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean,” Cordesman noted.
Control over even small portions of Yemen by hostile forces could threaten key US allied regimes in Riyadh and Cairo, calling into question both “the economic stability of [the US-backed military dictatorship in] Egypt," and "the security of Saudi Arabia’s key port at Jeddah and major petroleum export facility outside the Gulf,” Cordesman noted.


http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015.../yeme-a07.html

500 Yemen rebels dead on border since air war began: Saudi

By Jamal al-Jabiri 1 hour ago

Sanaa (AFP) - Saudi Arabia said Saturday at least 500 Shiite insurgents have been killed in border clashes since the coalition it heads launched air strikes against the Huthi rebels in war-battered Yemen.

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A defence ministry statement in Riyadh also said three soldiers were killed in a mortar attack on the kingdom's border with Yemen on Friday.

The statement gave the first reported death toll for border clashes since the coalition launched air strikes against Shiite Huthi rebels in Yemen last month.

Earlier, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assiri told journalists at his daily briefing in Riyadh there had been 1,200 coalition air strikes between March 26 and midday Saturday.

He said the raids had neutralised the air and ballistic capabilities of the rebels and their allies, and "will continue".

Assiri also told reporters: "At the appropriate time, we will take action on the ground."
View gallery

Yemeni demonstrators place signs on concrete barriers at the Saudi embassy in Sanaa on April 11, 201 …

Saudi state news agency SPA cited the defence ministry as saying the three Saudi soldiers died on Friday and two were wounded when mortar rounds hit their border observation post in Najran province.
Last week, three Saudi border guards were killed in an attack by the Huthis, who control parts of northern Yemen along the frontier.

With the air campaign and fighting on the ground in Yemen showing no sign of easing, the Red Cross on Saturday delivered a second planeload of aid to Sanaa in as many days.

The aid is urgently needed for hundreds wounded in fighting between pro-government forces and the Huthi rebels, who are allies of troops loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

- More aid arrives -
View galler

Members of the International Committee of the Red Cross unload emergency medical aid at the internat …

Coalition warplanes on Saturday launched several raids in and around Sanaa, with at least 11 around Sanhan, Saleh's hometown.

A raid on military targets in Amran province north of Sanaa killed eight rebels, medics said on the 18th day of the air campaign.

Fighting in and around the southern city of Aden since late Friday between rebels and pro-government forces has killed 42 people including three civilians, medics and military sources said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said its aircraft landed in Sanaa with medical equipment after weeks of intense fighting across the country.

"The new cargo is 35.6 tonnes, of which 32 tonnes is medical aid and the rest water purifying equipment, electric power generators and tents," ICRC spokeswoman Marie Claire Feghali said.
View gallery

Smoke rises above the military academy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 11, 2015, following an a …

The Red Cross and the UN also sent planes to Sanaa on Friday, each with 16 tonnes of medicine and equipment, the first aid delivery to the capital since the air campaign began.

Russia's news website Vesti.ru reported that two Russian planes were unable to land in Sanaa on Saturday to evacuate hundreds of civilians after being denied coalition permission to enter Yemeni airspace.

More than two weeks of heavy bombardment against opponents of exiled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and fighting between rival militias has prompted a UN call for a freeze in the violence.

UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, Johannes Van Der Klaauw, said an "immediate humanitarian pause in this conflict" was desperately needed to allow aid deliveries.

- Rebel convoy ambushed -
View gallery

Yemeni supporters of the southern separatist movement fire towards Huthi rebels during clashes in th …

The World Health Organization says nearly 650 people have been killed and more than 2,000 wounded in the recent escalation.

Yemen's second city Aden has seen some of the toughest fighting.
On Saturday, pro-Hadi forces ambushed rebels aboard a 30-vehicle convoy which tried to enter a neighbourhood where oil refineries are located, Hadi loyalists said.

Thirteen rebels and four loyalist forces were killed, they added.

Saturday's air raids also destroyed a police station near Sanhan where rebels stockpiled weapons, and they also targeted a special forces camp loyal to Saleh in the central province of Baida, witnesses said.

Elsewhere, Sunni tribesmen who support Hadi ambushed and killed 18 rebels on the road between Taez and Lahj as they headed for Aden, military sources said.

The fighting has been so fierce in south Yemen that hundreds of civilians have fled across the Gulf of Aden.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR says at least 900 people, most of them Somalis, but also including Yemenis, have arrived in the Horn of Africa in the past 10 days.

Yemen, strategically located near key shipping routes, was plunged into chaos last year when the Huthis seized Sanaa, forcing Hadi to flee to Aden and then Riyadh.

SPA said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius arrived on Saturday in Riyadh.

A diplomatic source said he will discuss the Yemen crisis in talks on Sunday and also voice support for Hadi.

http://news.yahoo.com/500-yemen-rebe...192933949.html