Yemeni Civil War

The radio station of Yemen’s Houthi-run interior ministry said yesterday the militia’s former war ally turned adversary, ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, had been killed as fighting racked the capital Sanaa though there was no independent confirmation.

The Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes on Yemen’s capital Sanaa overnight on Sunday, local media said, lending support to loyalists of former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh after he signaled a strategy shift that could pave the way to end the war.

Yemeni witnesses and officials say a powerful car bomb has struck a government building in the southern port city of Aden, killing five people and wounding 12. The attack was then claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant.

A vessel carrying the first shipment of food aid in three weeks docked on Nov. 26 at the rebel-controlled Red Sea port of Saleef in western Yemen, a United Nations official said.

Humanitarian aid workers and medical supplies began arriving in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Saturday, U.N. officials said, after the easing of a nearly three-week military blockade that sparked an international outcry.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said on Nov. 22 it would reopen a key Red Sea port and Sanaa airport to aid, after a more than two-week blockade following a missile attack on Riyadh.

The United Nations and more than 20 aid groups said on Nov. 9 that the Saudi-led coalition’s tightening of a blockade on war-torn Yemen could bring millions of people closer to "starvation and death."

Yemen, who has been subjected to a Saudi Arabian blockade since Monday, faces the worst famine in recent decades, which can take millions of victims, warned UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lukok, quoted by the France press.

Yemeni rebels on Saturday targeted an airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital with a ballistic missile, according to Yemen’s Houthi-controlled Defense Ministry.

But the missile was intercepted over northeast Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry of Defense said in a statement carried on government-backed Al-Arabiya television.

More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Yemen since March 2015, including 1,184 children, the U.N. human rights office said on Sept. 5, renewing its calls for an international probe into the conflict.