An explosion on Wednesday ripped through a Yemeni military vehicle in the south of the country, killing five soldiers, while another four civilians died in the ensuing firefight.
The blast hit the vehicle close to a busy market selling qat, the mildly stimulating leaf that Yemenis addictively chew, in the town of Zinjibar, in a province known as a stronghold for Muslim militants, including al-Qaeda.
“We heard the sound of explosions and saw fire coming out of the car. The soldiers were lying on the ground,” eyewitness Ali Dahmash said.
The panicked surviving soldiers began firing in the air, and were joined by soldiers rushing to the scene. Four civilians in the marketplace were killed by the gunfire, and more than 20 were wounded Dahmash said.
Yemen is home to one of the most active branches al-Qaeda, but military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said they were not sure who the assailants were.
Extremists regularly attack soldiers in the lawless, impoverished country, which is also wracked by pro-democracy demonstrators calling for the ouster of longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
On Wednesday, tens of thousands gathered in Yemen’s major cities, as they have for the past months to reiterate their demand that Saleh step down after more than 30 years in power.
More than 140 people have died since the protests began nearly three months ago.
In the southern province of Aden, a general strike shuttered shops, closed schools and halted commercial transport, in the latest efforts to pressure Saleh to leave.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS