SANAA, 10 April 2007 — Fierce battles between government forces and Shiite rebel fighters in the northern province of Saada have left at least 35 troops and 50 rebels dead in the past week, a government official said yesterday.
The official told Arab News that scores of soldiers and rebels loyal to local Shiite leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi were wounded in continuing battles in Saada.
He said the fighting was taking place mainly in the Dhahian town north of the provincial city of Saada, some 240 km north of the capital Sanaa. “What is going on now is guerrilla fight from house to house,” said the official who asked not to be named.
Saada has been the scene of fierce battles between the army and rebel fighters, acting under the umbrella of the underground Believing Youth late last December, after authorities accused rebels of attacking military and police posts in the volatile province.
Authorities have accused the rebels of trying to topple the republican regime and establish an Islamic state, saying that “foreign parties” have been supporting them. No exact death toll was available, but local sources in Saada put the number of fatalities among troops at around 150 and the rebels at about 400.
The Believing Youth group was first established by Shiite cleric Hussein Badruddin Al-Houthi in mid-2004. Hussein was killed in clashes with the army in September 2004. Bloody confrontations between the rebels and the army have since left more than 720 government troops dead, according to the official toll. Hundreds of rebels have also been killed.
Yemeni media reports recently quoted government officials accusing Iran and Libya of financing the rebels. Both states have denied the charge.
In another development, a Yemeni court yesterday acquitted a Dane of Somali origin and a Yemeni man of attempting to smuggle arms to the Islamic Courts movement in Somalia last year.
The court’s chief judge Najeeb Al-Qadri said the prosecution had failed to provide sufficient evidence to support the arms trafficking charge against the Danish national of Somali origin Abdi Othman Suli, 28, and the Yemeni Abdullah Awadh Al-Masri, 37.
The court, however, sentenced Al-Masri to three years in prison after it convicted him of sheltering fugitive Al-Qaeda operatives in a house in Sanaa last year.
Both men were among a group of eight people arrested in Sanaa last October on suspicion that they have been involved in trafficking arms to the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled most of southern and central Somalia until December last year when forces of the transitional government, backed by Ethiopian forces, evicted it out of Mogadishu.
The other six foreigners; A German, a Briton, an Austrian and three Australians were released without trial for lack of evidence. When the trial began on Feb. 5, prosecutors charged the two men with smuggling arms, including anti-aircraft and sniper weapons, from Yemen to members of UIC in Somalia.
Also a man has admitted to spraying petrol on worshippers at a Yemeni mosque before setting them on fire, the official Saba news agency said yesterday.
Amran district security chief Fathul Al-Qusi told the agency that Ahmed Al-Shumi confessed to the crime after he was detained and questioned.
Thirty people were wounded, eight of them seriously, in the attack during Muslim Friday prayers at the mosque in Amran some 60 kilometers (40 miles) north of the capital Sanaa.
The agency added that Shumi tended to the injured after the attack and that he would undergo psychiatric tests to assess his mental state.
— With input from agencies
