SANAA: Yemen’s new Shiite power brokers sent fighters toward an Al-Qaeda stronghold on Wednesday, raising the possibility of a showdown between the politically ascendant Houthi movement and the hard-line Sunnis of the transnational militant network.

Witnesses said dozens of cars carrying armed Houthi fighters were seen arriving in the city of Ibb, bordering Al-Bayda province, a bastion of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Residents said some Houthi fighters had gathered at the main stadium in Ibb, 150 km south of Sanaa. “The governor and his aides received the armed men outside the city and entered with them,” a provincial official told Reuters. Another convoy of several cars carrying Houthis was later seen on the outskirts of Taiz, a city 50 km south of Ibb.

Also on Wednesday, residents and a local official said a drone strike hit a car carrying suspected Al-Qaeda militants in Shabwa province. The car was completely burnt and destroyed.

In a separate sign of the fragility of Yemen’s embattled state, southern separatists seeking to split from the north set an ultimatum for the government to evacuate its soldiers and civil servants by Nov. 30.

The Southern Herak movement also asked foreign firms producing oil and gas in the region to halt exports immediately.

“The state of the south is coming and no power can stop us from achieving this,” the statement said.

Southern Herak asked all companies operating in oil and gas to halt their exports until technicians appointed by the movement could oversee the process and revenues are placed in banks under the name of a new southern state.

Yemen is a small producer with proven oil reserves of about 3 billion barrels. In March US authorities estimated Yemen’s output at 100,000 barrels per day, mostly from the Marib-Jawf area in the north, with the rest from Masila in the southeast.

France’s Total, the biggest foreign investor with activities in the south, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Herak statement capped several days of growing separatist activism triggered by the Houthis’ capture of Sanaa. Herak appears to have drawn inspiration from the Houthis’ ability to dictate terms to Hadi and to outmaneuver a military establishment weakened by rifts, a spectacular rise to national importance for a once obscure rural political movement.