SANAA: Warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition hit Yemen rebel positions in the central city of Taiz and in the south early Saturday, shortly after a U.N.-brokered humanitarian truce came into effect, witnesses said.
Two air raids targeted Shiite Houthi rebel positions in Arbaeen Street in Taez, where clashes between the Iran-backed insurgents and fighters loyal to exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi continued after the truce began at midnight, witnesses said.
Violence continued through the night in Taez, with witnesses saying the Huthis had also bombed several neighborhoods.
Yemen's official news agency, which is run by the exiled government, accused the Huthis and allied troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh of sending reinforcements to the city ahead of the truce.
In the south, coalition warplanes also hit rebels in the port city of Aden and nearby Lahj province, witnesses said.
The raids came after the rebels bombed several neighborhoods of Aden, according to Abdullah al-Dayani, a spokesman of the southern fighters allied with Hadi.
Warplanes also flew sorties over the capital Sanaa, but there were no attacks after midnight, witnesses said.
The Saudi-led coalition has not committed to the truce, which a Saudi official described as "useless," questioning whether the rebels would stick to it.
The six-day pause to allow in desperately needed aid was declared after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon received assurances from Hadi and Houthi rebels that it would be respected.
Cautious hopes as Yemen truce takes hold
Agencies
ADEN / SANAA: A long-awaited humanitarian truce went into effect in war-torn Yemen after midnight Friday after fierce clashes on the ground, Saudi-led airstrikes, and cautious hopes that the pause will be able to hold.
The weeklong truce will end at the same time as the month of Ramadan and aims to get desperately needed assistance to some 21 million Yemenis. All sides said they hoped a full cease-fire would follow, but both sides to the conflict expressed doubts.
A Saudi-led coalition of Arab states has been bombing the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel movement since late March in a bid to restore to power Yemen’s President Abed Rabbou Mansour Hadi, who has fled to Riyadh.
The Houthis shelled residential areas in the southern port of Aden overnight and pushed further into Yemen’s eastern Hadramawt desert, the center of the country’s modest oil resources, fighting tribal militiamen, a local official said.
The Saudi-led campaign of airstrikes targeted Sanaa Friday and hit mainly central and southern cities overnight. On Thursday night, an airstrike hit a school housing refugees in the southern province of Lahj, killing nine people and wounding 14 others, residents said.
The coalition has pounded the Houthis and their army allies from the air since March 26 as part of a bid to restore Hadi to power. The air raids and fighting have killed more than 3,000 people since then.
“We hope this truce will be the beginning of the end of the Saudi aggression and the end of the violation of United Nations conventions that the war of aggression on Yemen has seen,” a top Houthi leader, Mohammad al-Houthi said in a statement.
However, in a televised speech Tuesday, Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, leader of the Houthi Ansarullah group, doubted that the cease-fire would hold.
“As for the truce, we don’t have big hope in its success, because its success is linked to the commitment of the Saudi regime and its allies,” he said.
“Our experience in the previous truce was bitter and unfortunate. It became a truce only for the media, but what was happening on the ground was something else, the daily airstrikes continued.”
The coalition had no comment on the cease-fire but an unnamed Saudi official, speaking to AFP Friday, dismissed the truce as “useless,” saying the coalition had not received “any evidence of commitment of the other party.”
But the party of Yemen’s ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose loyalists in the military have been a major ally in the Houthi’s advance in Yemen’s south, welcomed the pause.
U.N. envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed clinched the deal after intensive discussions with Houthi leaders Thursday.
He told Reuters that the more thorny political discussions would wait until after the humanitarian work was done.
Yemen’s government has demanded that the Houthis comply with a U.N. Security Council Resolution in April which called on them to quit seized land and release prisoners.
“We must distinguish between the so-called humanitarian truce which has been insisted upon by the United Nations for a while and what we insist upon and hope for: that there will be a full truce with a comprehensive ceasefire including the withdrawal of forces,” Yemeni Foreign Minister Riyadh Yasseen told state-owned Saudi Ekhbariya TV Thursday.
And the human rights minister in Hadi’s government, Ezzedine al-Asbahi, cast doubt over the rebels’ commitment. “They exercise high-level trickery, even with the international community. Their military movements on the ground do not reflect a good will, or sincere decision to cement a humanitarian truce,” he told AFP.
Meanwhile, aid agencies scrambled to rush desperately needed relief supplies to millions of Yemenis threatened with famine.
World Food Program spokeswoman Abeer Etefa told AFP the truce was “our final hope” to reach areas needing aid.
She added two ships carrying food and fuel were waiting off Aden to dock.
U.N. aid agencies are ready to scale up operations during the pause, although the response to an appeal for $1.6 billion has been meager, with just 13 percent of that amount received so far.
Etefa said the WFP managed over the past week to deliver 9,000 tons of food to its warehouses in Yemen, adding that the truce is needed to secure its delivery. Nearly 40 trucks in two convoys to Aden and Saada have yet to reach their destinations because of damaged roads and security problems, she said.
“We hope to see an effective respect for the ceasefire, and to allow us to reach all parts of Yemen regardless of who controls them,” she said.
This will be the second ceasefire since the coalition launched its March air campaign against the northern rebels and troops loyal to former president Saleh.
A five-day truce in May allowed aid to reach civilians, but UN efforts to prolong it failed. Sanaa resident Mohammed al-Juhayfi said he was already dreading the end of the truce.
“We do not want a truce of five or ten days, which we will then count by the minute. We want a full solution for the Yemen crisis,” he said.
