UAE pounds Yemen rebels after coalition's deadliest day

The Houthi controlled defense ministry building and special security forces command were among the targets.

Yemenis stop and look up in front of a building heavily damaged in intensified Saudi-led coalition airstrikes on Sanaa on September 5.EPA

The UAE bombarded Yemen’s Houthi rebels with air strikes on Saturday as it mourned 45 soldiers killed in the deadliest day yet for the Saudi-led coalition fighting the insurgents.

Emirati officials have vowed that the deaths in the battleground eastern oil province of Marib would not sap their commitment to the coalition’s mission to restore exiled President Abdrabu Mansur Hadi.

The UAE forces suffered the heaviest casualties when a missile fired by the rebels hit the munitions store at a camp, triggering huge explosions that also killed 10 members of Saudi Arabia’s armed forces and five Bahraini troops.

Emirati warplanes carried out pre-dawn bombing raids against the rebels in Marib and Sanaa as well as their stronghold of Saada in the far north and the central city of Ibb.

The air strikes targeted a mine-making plant in the Houthi-dominated Saada province in northern Yemen, as well as military camps and weapon stores in the central Ibb province and in the capital Sanaa, causing heavy damage.

Sanaa residents said the Houthi-controlled defence ministry building and the command of the special security forces were among the targets hit overnight.

“These are the heaviest air strikes that Sanaa has endured,” a local official said.

The streets remained deserted as the bombing continued into the daylight hours.

Coalition warplanes also bombed the rebel position from which the missile is believed to have been fired, a local official and witnesses said.

The Baihan district of Shabwa province, which borders Marib, is one of the rebels’ last redoubts in the south.

The Houthis said they had fired a Tochka missile at the coalition’s Safer camp in Marib.

The UAE has denounced the attack as “cowardly”, and the coalition spokesman General Ahmed Assiri said the war against the rebels would not ease.

“The mission of the coalition forces is to restore peace and stability to Yemen,” the daily Al Riyadh quoted him as saying.

“They will continue their military operations until their objectives are achieved.”

Marib province is the location of Yemen’s main oil fields and has seen fierce fighting in recent weeks as loyalist forces and their coalition allies have advanced north after liberating Aden in mid-July.

Loyalist military sources said that the coalition had sent reinforcements to the Safer base last week, including tanks, armoured vehicles, troop carriers, rocket launchers and Apache helicopters.

Troops from Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as Saudi-trained Yemeni forces, also arrived.

The extra hardware and troops were intended to boost “the counter-offensive launched by loyalist forces and the coalition to advance on Sanaa”, one military official said.

Meanwhile in Jawf, a massive desert province north of Marib, hundreds of Saudi-trained Yemeni fighters and coalition troops have set up military encampments in the north-western Al Yetema crossing bordering Saudi Arabia, pro-government security officials and tribal leaders there said. The move is part of the military plan to seize Jawf in order to advance on the neighbouring Sadaa, the heartland of the Houthis.

The coalition launched its campaign when Mr Hadi was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia in March after the rebels entered his last refuge, Yemen’s second city Aden.

After his loyalists recaptured the southern port city in July, the coalition launched a ground operation which has seen the rebels pushed back from five southern provinces, although they still control the capital Sanaa and much of the north and centre.

UAE troops have played a leading role in the operation and seven had already been killed in the fighting.

But Friday’s losses were the heaviest since the formation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971 and, as the dead soldiers were buried on Saturday, the country began three days of national mourning.

* With reporting from Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Wam