SANAA, 29 March 2005 — At least eight followers of a slain rebel preacher were killed in clashes with the army and police in northwest Yemen yesterday after they shot dead four policemen, local government sources said.
Army and police units launched an offensive in Saada province against supporters of Hussein Badruddin Al-Houthi, who was killed by the army last year, the sources told AFP.
It followed a dawn attack by the militants against a police patrol in Nushur, northeast of the town of Saada, which killed four police and wounded three.
Earlier, a local official said seven police were killed in the ambush. “At least eight members of the Faithful Youth organization, which Houthi headed, were killed,” one local source said, requesting anonymity. Another 12 members of the security forces, who bombarded strongholds of the militants, are believed to have been wounded in the clashes, the source added.
The fighting was sparked by an attempt by security forces to strip Houthi’s followers of their heavy weapons, one tribal source said.
Three prominent Faithful Youth members were killed and two others wounded on March 19 “when police attacked them as they tried to buy weapons and ammunition from a store,” a local official told AFP at the time.
Witnesses said three policemen were injured in that clash, the first since the Yemeni government announced in September last year that the army had killed Houthi, a radical preacher, nearly three months after he started a rebellion in the mountainous northwest.
The local official said after the March 19 incident that security forces had been hunting down members of the Faithful Youth organization, an offshoot of the Islamist opposition movement Al-Haq formed in 1992, after hundreds of detained Houthi followers “refused to drop their radical religious views”.
According to Saada residents, Faithful Youth militants launched several attacks on security outposts in the province over the past few days to avenge the March 19 killing of their three comrades.
Abdullah Ayedh Al-Razami, a top Houthi aide, is leading the militants in the latest confrontations, the tribal source said.
Razami was reported by officials to have surrendered to authorities along with dozens of supporters 10 days after the announcement of Houthi’s death. They turned themselves in in Saada, where they had been besieged by army troops for more than two months.
But Razami, who was later released by authorities, has gone back to Saada and is leading the resistance to attempts to disarm his faction, according to the local sources.
