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AL-MUKALLA: At least three Houthis were killed and five more wounded in fighting with government forces in Yemen’s besieged city of Taiz on Saturday, a local military official said.
Abdul Basit Al-Baher, spokesman for the Yemeni army in Taiz, told Arab News that the Iran-backed Houthis attacked government troops in two contested areas northeast of Taiz, resulting in a battle in which three Houthis were killed and five Yemeni government troops and five Houthis were injured.
“The Houthi militia conducts such attacks in Taiz to acquire territory,” Al-Baher said.
The Houthi attack on Saturday is the latest in a series of military activities in Taiz and other disputed regions in Yemen that, analysts and officials say, might impede ongoing international attempts to resolve the conflict.
People in Taiz say the UN-brokered cease-fire, which has been in place for more than a year, has not resulted in the easing of the Houthi’s siege on the city, nor the cessation of the militia’s intermittent lethal bombardments and assaults on civilian areas.
In the past 48 hours, according to Taiz residents, the Houthis fired mortar shells at a site for internally displaced persons and laborers on a new road in Taiz.
Separately, Sami Hemaid, the Yemeni head of the Saudi-funded Masam demining program’s teams in Hodeidah, told Arab News that information from two young herdsmen led to the discovery of two Houthi-planted land mine fields in the western province of Hodeidah.
Hemaid said the herdsmen contacted Masam’s team in Hodeidah after discovering land mines in Hodeidah’s Hays district, which were presumably unearthed by flooding. Masam dispatched a team, who cordoned off the affected regions and began searching for land mines. During the early hours of the mission, the deminers discovered at least six land mines, which led them to another contaminated area, previously the site of intense combat between government troops and the Houthis during the conflict in Hodeidah, which was, for the most part, resolved by the United Nations-brokered Stockholm Agreement in 2018.
“This area was a battleground, and the Houthis laid mines extensively and indiscriminately, resulting in several civilian fatalities,” Hemaid said.
Yemeni organizations tracking civilian fatalities from Houthi land mines in Hodeidah say hundreds of people have been killed and many more injured since 2018. The most recent verified Houthi land mine casualty in Hodeidah was a 29-year-old civilian killed in the At-Tuhayta district on Friday.
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