Fighting yesterday raged in Yemen’s battleground southern city Aden, a day after the UN declared its highest level humanitarian emergency in the war-torn country.
The new clashes left seven rebels and five pro-government fighters dead, a military official said.
It comes after rebel rocket fire on a residential district of Aden killed 31 civilians on Wednesday and left more than 100 wounded, a medical official said.
Rebel shelling on a western district of Aden early yesterday damaged several homes and left casualties, residents said.
Meanwhile, a port near the Aden oil refinery came under rebel artillery shelling for a fifth consecutive day and a blaze continued in the area, Aden Refinery Co spokesman Naser al-Shayef said.
In the adjacent Lahj Province and nearby Shabwa, Saudi-led coalition warplanes carried out several overnight strikes against rebel positions, residents said.
The coalition has been bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels since March 26 in support of Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia.
The UN on Wednesday declared Yemen a level-three emergency, the highest on its scale, as aid chief Stephen O’Brien held talks to discuss the crisis in the Arabian Peninsula country.
More than 21.1 million people — over 80 percent of Yemen’s population — are in need of aid, with 13 million facing food shortages.
Meanwhile, Iran has intensified a media counteroffensive against Riyadh, accusing its regional rival of inflicting catastrophic suffering in Yemen while presenting itself as a blameless peacemaker.
Iranian state media have given blanket coverage in Arabic, Farsi and English to the three-month-old war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and Sunni Arab allies have been bombing the Iranian-allied Houthi faction for over three months.
In its latest broadside, the hardline Fars news agency on Wednesday released a video clip showing the face of Saudi King Salman morphing into that of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who is loathed in Tehran as its enemy in a 1980-1988 war, interspersed with scenes of crying Yemeni children.
Another tactic was a state sponsored cartoon contest about the Yemen war — even as an Iranian court sentenced an activist to more than 12 years in jail on charges including drawing cartoons of Iranian lawmakers.
One entry showed a Saudi fighter jet delivering bloodied Yemenis into the hands of militants, while the winner depicted the Islamic profession of faith being erased from the Saudi flag as bombs rained down.
“Ir
an’s political win comes from the ability to present itself as a potential peacemaker, rather than the ability actually to secure a deal on the ground,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“The Iranian strategy has changed partly because of a change of circumstances... [The embargo] prevents them from supporting the Saleh-Houthi alliance in an overt way,” said Ayham Kamel, Middle East director at the Eurasia Group consultancy, referring to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Iranian diplomats have cast Tehran as a peacemaker, putting forward peace plans and decrying “external meddling” from the UN to the Islamic Organization Conference.
“They are trying to turn on its head the narrative that Iran is always the one destabilizing the region,” Barnes-Dacey said.
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