Government troops regained full control of Yemen’s Aden port on Monday (January 4), after hours of fierce clashes with gunmen who stormed the facility a day earlier.
The government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has been grappling with lawlessness in the southern port since militiamen, backed by a Saudi-led Arab alliance, drove the Iran-allied Houthis out in July.
The clashes were concentrated around the cargo and container terminals in Aden, which the gunmen had sought to seize from security forces, according to Nizar Anwar, a spokesman for Aden local government.
Eight members of the security forces and four gunmen died in the clashes, Anwar told Reuters, adding that security forces managed to secure both terminals.
One Yemeni soldier said that despite more than 9 months of conflict that has plunged the impoverished country into a crippling humanitarian crisis, the troops were ready to fight.
“We are willing to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of safety and security, even if we don’t get a cent for it. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves for free for the sake of our country, with our souls and with our blood and our money until the last man standing,” said Ahmed Naser.
Hadi toured the cargo terminal in the city’s Mualla district on Monday (January 4), demonstrating that the facility was under government control.
The clashes at the port prompted the government to call for a dusk to dawn curfew to be imposed in the southern port city starting Monday (December 4).
Yemen descended into a civil war in March when the Houthis forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia after they closed in on Aden, drawing in a Saudi-led coalition into the Yemen conflict.
Tensions mounted further this weekend after the Houthis joined Shi’ite Iran in condemning the decision by Sunni Muslim power Saudi Arabia to execute a prominent Shi’ite cleric.
Islamist militants, local tribesmen and criminals have exploited the fighting to spread chaos in the areas vacated by the Houthis.
A series of attacks have rocked Aden since July, including a booby-trapped car attack that killed Aden’s governor General Jaafar Mohammed Saad and six members of his entourage last month.
In the latest attack on Monday, gunmen shot dead Sheikh Ali Othman al-Gailani, a member of a Sunni Muslim Sufi group — a mystical school of Islam — after he left a mosque in the city’s Crater district, witnesses said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack and the motive was not immediately clear, but the Islamic State and al Qaeda oppose the Sufi school and have attacked its members elsewhere in the Middle East in recent years. (Reuters)
