Heavy artillery clashes between Yemen’s dominant Houthi rebels and local fighters shook the southern cities of Taiz and Dalea yesterday, residents said, and a Yemeni official said UN peace talks set to take place in Geneva, Switzerland, later this week had been delayed.
Militiamen seized the main security directorate and strategic mountaintop buildings from the Houthis in Dalea, a bastion of a secessionist movement in Yemen’s formerly independent south, much of which has been destroyed in more than two months of fighting.
Ten soldiers loyal to the Houthis and three southern militiamen were killed, fighters and residents said.
In the southern city of Taiz, Houthi fighters pushed back tribal and Muslim militiamen amid heavy street combat and Arab air raids hit a military base loyal to Houthis in the capital, Sana’a, yesterday.
A Saudi-led coalition has been bombing the Iran-allied Houthis for months and supporting Yemeni fighters opposing the groups in battle lines drawn across the country.
Yemen’s exiled government in Saudi Arabia, led by President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has demanded the Houthis recognize its authority and withdraw from Yemen’s main cities — two points demanded by a UN Security Council resolution last month.
Those demands might have pushed back UN-sponsored negotiations scheduled to take place in Geneva on Thursday.
“The Geneva meeting has been indefinitely postponed, because the Houthis did not indicate their commitment to implement the UN Security Council resolution,” Hadi aide Sultan al-Atwani told reporters by telephone from Riyadh.
“Also, what is happening on ground — the attacks on Aden, Taiz, Dalea and Shabwa — makes it difficult to go to Geneva,” he said.
However, Ahmad Fawzi, a UN spokesman in Geneva, said that he could not confirm the reports of a delay to talks, adding that plans were still underway for negotiations to start on Thursday.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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