Rockets struck a hotel housing Yemen’s prime minister in the southern port city of Aden, killing 15 Yemeni and coalition troops in the first major attack on one of their bases since the city was recaptured from Houthi rebels in July.
Four of those killed were from the United Arab Emirates, the emirates’ official WAM news agency reported.
Yemeni Prime Minister Khalid Bahah and other officials were unhurt, said Yemeni government spokesman Rajeh Badi, who blamed the Houthis as well as forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh for the attack on al-Qasr Hotel.
Photo: Reuters
The government was to hold an emergency meeting later yesterday to discuss the incident, he said.
The seizure of Aden was the first real victory for the Saudi-led coalition after a four-month bombing campaign and a largely unacknowledged deployment of ground troops. It enabled Yemen’s Saudi-backed President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, driven into exile by the rebels early this year, to return to his country for the first time in months.
“The attempt to kill Bahah will obviously escalate things,” Farea al-Muslimi, a visiting academic at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said by telephone. “If Aden is your sample haven and you can’t secure it, it doesn’t send a good message to the rest of Yemen which is still under Houthi control.”
When Hadi visited Aden last month, he was guarded by coalition forces at the hotel. Troops and armored vehicles stood guard outside, and there were large sandbags by the front gate. Inside, Bahah holds meetings with southern leaders and fighters as the government tries to restore its rule over a country struggling through years of political and economic turmoil.
The hotel was among a series of targets in Aden hit by explosions yesterday, WAM said in an earlier report.
Coalition forces are still verifying the number of injuries, it said.
In Yemen’s central oil-rich province of Marib, 40 government troops and tribal fighters were killed and 137 others wounded in battles with Houthi fighters, the pro-government forces media center said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Troops backed by coalition forces and airstrikes captured several positions from rebels and forces aligned to Saleh, the government said in the statement.
The coalition suffered its worst losses to date when at least 52 Emirati soldiers were killed in a missile attack in Marib last month.
The Shiite Houthis, who said for decades they had been marginalized by the central government, took over most of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, in September last year.
They accused Hadi’s administration of failing to confront the Sunni militants of al-Qaeda, whose presence in the nation has grown.
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