A cyclone with hurricane-force winds yesterday made landfall on Yemen’s Arabian Sea coast, flooding the country’s fifth-largest city, Mukalla, and sending thousands of people fleeing for shelter.
Officials and meteorologists say the storm is the most intense in decades in the arid country, whose storm response is hampered by poverty and a raging civil war.
In the provincial capital, Mukalla, whose 300,000 people are largely ruled by al-Qaeda fighters since the army withdrew in April, water submerged cars on city streets and caused dozens of families to flee to a hospital for fear of rock slides.
Residents said the seafront promenade and many homes had been destroyed by the cyclone, called Chapala, and officials in the dry hinterland province of Shabwa said about 6,000 people had moved to higher ground.
“The wind knocked out power completely in the city and people were terrified. Some residents had to leave their homes and escape to higher areas where flooding was less. It was a difficult night, but it passed off peacefully,” said Sabri Saleem, who lives in Mukalla.
There were no initial reports of injuries.
An al-Qaeda militant on Twitter prayed for deliverance from the storm and said that a US drone was flying especially low over the city, where the militant group’s deputy leader was killed in an air strike in June.
“May God cause it to crash,” said the man, going by the name of Laith al-Mukalla.
“God spare us your wrath, and place the rains in heart of the valleys and mountains,” he said.
The cyclone first hit the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, killing three people and displacing thousands.
An island of natural beauty, Socotra is home to hundreds of plant species found nowhere else on Earth and lies 380km off Yemen in the Arabian Sea. Its 50,000 residents speak their own language.
Meteorological agencies predicted Chapala would hit land around Balhaf, site of Yemen’s liquefied natural gas terminal, and weaken as it advanced toward the capital, Sana’a, in the north.
The facility has been mostly shuttered since the start of a war in March between a Saudi-led Arab military coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement, which controls Sana’a.
It was not immediately clear if the terminal, once a lifeline for Yemen’s weak economy, suffered damage.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing