In neighboring Dalea, two soldiers died on Sunday when a bomb they were trying to defuse outside the gate of an army camp exploded, witnesses and local officials said.
Yemen, neighbor to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, has been a Western security concern since a Yemen-based regional Al-Qaeda arm claimed responsibility for a failed December attempt to bomb a US-bound plane.
Yemen’s Western allies and Saudi Arabia fear a resurgent Al-Qaeda wing could exploit unrest to use Yemen as a base for destabilizing attacks in the region and beyond. They want the government to resolve internal conflict and consolidate power. But a separatist movement in the south has taken on steam in recent months, with deaths on both sides, even as a separate civil war with Shi’ite rebels subsides in a northern corner of the Arabian Peninsula state.
On Saturday, tribesmen blew up an oil pipeline in eastern Yemen in retaliation for an attack on one of their chiefs accused of harboring Al-Qaeda operatives, tribal sources said. The sabotage targeted a section of the pipeline that runs about six kilometres (four miles) east of Marib, capital of the province of the same name, the sources said.
Witnesses said the assailants first used a bulldozer to expose the pipeline before blowing it up, sparking a blaze which sent a column of black smoke over the site known as “Kilometer 40.”
It was not immediately clear what impact the attack would have on Yemen’s oil production.
The sources said the attack was retaliation for an army raid on the home of a tribal chief, Sheikh Nasser Gammad bin Dawham, who stood accused of sheltering Al-Qaeda members. They gave no details on the raid.
North and South Yemen formally united in 1990 but many in the south, where most of impoverished Yemen’s oil facilities are located, complain northerners have used unification to seize their resources and discriminate against them.
