At least 28 fighters were killed in clashes between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and government forces in Yemen’s Marib province over the last 24 hours, security officials from both sides said on Thursday.
Officials told The Associated Press that most of the fatalities were among the Houthis, who launched an assault on Marib’s Rahbah city this week. They also confirmed that 12 government soldiers were killed in the fighting. The latest Houthi offensive against Marib is the first since June, when 111 fighters were killed.
The Houthis launched an accelerated push to take the oil-rich province of Marib, which borders Saudi Arabia, in February. Marib is also the last major stronghold of the internationally recognised government of Yemen, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Capturing Marib would provide the Houthis with greater bargaining power in any peace talks, as they could easily launch attacks into neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
Since February, thousands of fighters, mostly Houthis, have died in the fighting. With the help of the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes, government forces have retaken most of the province since July. It is also a reason why the Houthis have stepped up attacks against Saudi Arabia and the coalition.
On Tuesday, the Houthis targeted Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport in a drone attack, wounding eight people. On the previous day, the rebels launched two ballistic missiles aimed at the Saudi cities of Jazan and Najran. Furthermore, the insurgents struck Yemen’s Al Anad coalition airbase with booby-trapped drones and ballistic missiles on Sunday, killing 30 soldiers and injuring 60.
The Houthis are believed to be close to Iran, which has been backing them financially and militarily since 2014. Tehran has also shown support for the Houthi’s National Salvation Government formed in 2016 as Yemen’s unofficial executive body after the rebels overran the Presidential Palace in Sana’a, forcing President Hadi to flee the country. Saudi Arabia and its allies are concerned about an increasing Iranian footprint through proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
The unrest in Yemen began in 2014 when a civil war broke out between the Houthis and the internationally recognised Hadi government. In 2015, a Saudi-led coalition launched a major offensive in Yemen by conducting airstrikes on Houthi-controlled areas. Since then, there has been no end in sight to the war in Yemen, and international efforts to halt the fighting have mostly failed. The war has killed around 130,000 people, and the United Nations has called the conflict in Yemen “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”