RADFAN: Five days of clashes between Yemeni troops, backed by tanks, and tribesmen in a southern town have left one soldier and one protester dead and at least 10 people injured, hospital officials said yesterday.
Police said that so far they have arrested 69 people suspected of taking part in rioting that engulfed southern Yemen, including 18 in the town of Radfan.
The protests were marking the anniversary of the 1994 southern separatist uprising, which was crushed by government troops.
South and North Yemen merged in 1990 but southerners say they are marginalized and separatist calls remain prevalent. The south has seen several bouts of violence since the unification.
The latest round of protests began on Monday in several places in the south, with protesters calling for secession from the north and accusing the central government of plundering the south’s wealth.
Security forces tried to quell the protests but they turned violent in many places, with several stores being burned and private property damaged.
In Radfan, 220 km south of Sanaa, a construction worker who was among the protesters died on Thursday of shrapnel wounds in the Habalein area, hospital officials said.
Security officials said a soldier also died in the violence, but it was unclear when and how he died.
Radfan was particularly tense because local tribes tried to prevent the military from setting up checkpoints on the town edges and staged hit-and-run attacks on the army.
The troops backed with tanks edged closer to the town late Thursday, and shelling was heard early yesterday from hilltops. Radfan stores remained shut and only local gunmen roamed the streets.
Qassim Al-Efeify, head of the Habalein municipality, said the military operation aimed to rout the groups plotting to attack the military checkpoints.
Meanwhile, young women have added claws to Yemen’s anti-terror force.
The two young Yemeni women sitting in the office of the Central Security Forces (CSF) commander, Gen. Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, are serious indeed about fighting Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.
They demonstrated this in recent months by enduring a tough training course at the British Army’s Officer Academy at Sandhurst.
The elder of the two is 27. Since she is off duty, she is not wearing her unit’s mottled green camouflage uniform. Instead, she sports a rhinestone-studded black women’s garment, at the bottom of which peeked out athletic shoes and wide washed-out jeans.
“I’m 1.56 meters tall and weigh only 42 kilograms,” she says. “But on the forced marches through the cold forest I had to carry the same heavy equipment and rucksacks that the big Brits did.”
Once the petite Yemeni broke two ribs and was hospitalized, after which she resumed her training. She says she was proud of her resoluteness.
The other woman said: “And we started from scratch because girls in Yemen don’t do sports.”
In all, there are 27 women on the CSF’s anti-terrorism task force. The commander, a nephew of Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has a very high opinion of them.
“We need their help because terrorists sometimes use women to smuggle weapons and a male police officer can’t search them,” he says.
The anti-terrorism task force was established in 2003.
