Yemeni troops loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi gained control of an important north-western city on Friday, residents and tribal sources said, as a supposed cease-fire appeared increasingly fragile. The seven-day truce was declared to aid the chances of success of peace talks mediated by UN officials in Switzerland this week, in an effort to end the civil war that erupted in Yemen last year.
Al-Hazm, capital of the north-western al-Jawf province, had been under the control of the dominant Iranian-allied Houthi group until the pro-Hadi forces captured it after two days of fighting. The sources said the Hadi loyalist troops had also gained control of al-Labnat military base near al-Hazm, which had been under the control of the Houthi militia and their allies, fighters loyal to former President Ali Abdallah Saleh.
The impoverished country was plunged into war when the Houthis seized the capital Sanaa and marched south, triggering a Saudi-led military intervention in March. Saudi state news agency SPA cited the Saudi-led coalition of mainly Gulf Arab states as saying two missiles had been fired from Yemen towards Saudi Arabia in the latest fighting. The coalition said the first was repelled and fell inside Yemeni territory near Marib and the other fell in a desert area east of the Saudi city of Najran.
"The leadership of the coalition asserts that while it is committed to the success of the negotiations in Geneva ... it will not abide by the cease-fire for long in the shadow of this threat to the kingdom's territory," SPA said. Each side has accused the other of repeated violations of the truce, which was supposed to begin on Tuesday. The UN-sponsored peace talks began away from television cameras on Tuesday in the hope of ending nearly nine months of conflict that have killed almost 6,000 people and displaced millions. The sources say the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, has however been meeting separately with the delegations.
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