By Sumayya
CAIRO — The number of dead from a Houthi rocket attack on a government military base in southern Yemen went up to 73 people, who were all new workers, making it the deadliest attack since fights in the nation started growing three months ago, a top Yemeni government leader said Tuesday.
The new workers were all between 18 and 20 years old, and some were still missing a day after the Iranian-supported fighters hit the al-Alam practice camp in the southern area of Shabwa with large rockets, Shabwa boss Awad Ibn al-Wazir told The Associated Press.
Monday’s strike was part of a recent jump in fighting in Yemen, which began when soldiers from the internationally accepted government and the Saudi-led group launched air attacks on the Houthi-controlled Sanaa International Airport in July, breaking a 2022 peace deal that had mostly stopped fights in the nation’s civil war.
Britain announced on Tuesday that it is growing its military help for Saudi Arabia against the Houthis to include protective air flights by Royal Air Force planes.
A Houthi rocket hit a living area in the blocked city of Taiz on Tuesday, killing two teenage girls and hurting six other people, local leaders said. Many buildings in the city’s Seina area were also broken, according to regional leaders. The Houthis have blocked Yemen’s third-biggest city as part of their months-long attack against Yemeni government forces, repeatedly hitting it with rockets and big guns.
The fighters have mostly surrounded the city and cut off most food and tool lines from government-held areas, putting everyday citizens at grave risk, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said Tuesday. The UN warned that the block has made prices jump very high, leaving many people living there without food and other basic needs.
“Charity help must be quickly let into the city and its movement must be made easy. Citizens wanting to leave must be allowed to do so freely and safely,” Turk said. He urged the Houthis and Saudi-supported government forces to avoid using blasting weapons in areas where they could hit normal citizens and city buildings.
The Houthis have also shot rockets and flying drones into Saudi Arabia, which has struggled to stop the attacks, even with much better U.S.-provided weapons. Tom Barrack, the U.S. helper for Syria and Iraq, told the Global Security Forum in Doha, Qatar, that while he understood that Saudi Arabia is in a very tough spot, the United States was not ready to send ground soldiers to help.
“I think the president has been clear that he supports Saudi Arabia, and the backing that they need with tools and movement we will supply, but America getting involved in a ground fighting battle somewhere else seems useless,” said Barrack, who is also the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. U.K.
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said the British government would grow its help to Saudi Arabia to include protective flights by RAF planes to shield Saudi cities from attacks, but would not hit Houthi areas on the ground. It means the British planes would hit rockets or drones in the sky, but Streeting said they would not attack Houthi locations on the ground. Britain had already offered to help with fueling Saudi planes mid-air.
The strike on the al-Alam camp hit while the new workers were lining up in rows for a practice session. Videos from the area spread online and checked by The Associated Press showed many still bodies lying on the sandy ground of the base. The attack also hurt more than 200 other new workers, the governor said. The victims were new workers from across Shabwa being trained to give safety in the local area and not for war fights, he said. “This had nothing to do with front lines,” he stated.
“They had not attacked anyone or moved against anything. It was only to protect the safety of their area.” Another government worker, who spoke without giving his name because he was not allowed to talk to the news, said many suffered bad wounds and were moved to hospitals in other areas in life-threatening shapes.
He said at least 15 of the dead workers were from a single Yemeni family group, Awlaqi, and another group, Maraziq, lost 16 of its members in the strike. The Shabwa regional government said in a note Monday that the Houthis shot three large rockets at the base. The Houthis took credit for the attack, saying they had killed and hurt dozens but did not give more details.
The camp, earlier used by a group supported by the United Arab Emirates, is in the Jardan area, north of the main regional city, Ataq. It sits on a vital supply path to the government-run area of Marib. Shabwa, Marib, and the nearby Hadramawt area form what has been called the Yemeni government’s “triangle of power,” a key space that holds the country’s oil and gas making buildings.
Saudi leaders put out an attack warning for the main city area late Tuesday morning. A loud blast was then heard in northern Riyadh, where King Khalid International Airport sits. Repeated Houthi attacks this month have forced the airport to stop its work.
The all-safe signal was given a short time later, and Saudi Arabia said it had stopped a large rocket shot by the Houthis. Yemen fell into a civil war in 2014, when the Houthis took Sanaa and much of northern Yemen and forced the government to leave the country.
A Saudi-led group jumped in the next year in an try to bring the government back to power. The war killed more than 150,000 people and made one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.
