(MENAFN- Arab Times) An air strike by warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition killed 36 civilians working at a bottling plant in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah on Sunday, residents said. In another air raid on the capital Sanaa, residents said four civilians were killed when a bomb hit their house near a military base in the south of the city. The attacks were the latest in an air campaign launched in March an alliance made up mainly of Gulf Arab states in support of the exiled government in its fight against Houthi forces allied to Iran. "The process of recovering the bodies is finished now. The corpses of 36 workers, many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant this morning," resident Issa Ahmed told Reuters by phone from the site in Hajjah.
A Saudi military spokesman did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the reported attacks. Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report this month that the campaign had left a "bloody trail of civilian death" which could amount to war crimes. Air strikes killed 65 people in the frontline city of Taiz last Friday, most of them civilians, and the bombing of a milk factory in Western Yemen in July killed 65 people including 10 children. More than 4,300 people have been killed in five months of war in Yemen while disease and suffering in the already impoverished country have spread.
Militias and army units loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, currently taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, have made significant gains toward the Houthi-controlled capital in the last two months but the group remains ensconced in Yemen's north and casualties mount in nationwide combat every day.
Meanwhile, Gunmen on a motorbike Sunday shot dead the director of security operations in war-strewn Yemen's second city Aden, police said. Colonel Abdelhakim al-Sanidi was killed as he was leaving his home in the coastal city's Mansura district, police officials said. The attackers fled after the shooting.
Yemeni authorities have long blamed the country's branch of al-Qaeda for such attacks on members of the security forces. Backed by weapons and troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, government loyalists recaptured Aden from Iran-backed rebels and their allies in mid-July, before retaking four other southern provinces. But security has remained fragile in the port city, where al-Qaeda suspects were accused last week of blowing up a building used by the secret police. They also set up checkpoints in a district of the southern city and seized five buildings including an intelligence services facility, officials said. Yemen's exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansur Hadi said on Saturday that his forces were battling Shiite Houthi rebels across the country to check "Iranian expansion" in the region. Hadi was speaking as he made a short visit to Sudan, which was seen as being close to Iran before it joined a Saudi-led coalition against the Yemeni rebels in April. "We are currently leading a war based on stopping Iranian expansion in the region," Hadi said at a press conference with his Sudanese counterpart Omar al- Bashir. "Iranian expansion is present now in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon," Hadi said.
His comments came as coalition warplanes launched strikes against the Iranian-backed rebel positions in Yemen and reinforcements reached pro-government troops preparing for an anticipated push towards the capital Sanaa, military sources reported. Hadi said rebel forces had been pushed back in recent weeks. "Now there are few provinces where battles are still going on.
There is fighting in Taez, and Ibb and Hodeida and Marib," he said. He arrived in Sudan on Saturday afternoon to meet Bashir for talks. Sudan had previously been seen as close to Iran, whose warships used to make stops in Sudanese ports. But last September, Sudan shut Iran's cultural centre in Khartoum and joined the coalition against the Houthis in March. A car bomb exploded Saturday in Yemen's rebel-held capital Sanaa, not far from the vacated US embassy complex and close to a position of the Shiite insurgents, witnesses said. The blast occurred near a mosque in Sawan neighbourhood, in northeastern Sanaa, close to a checkpoint leading to the US Embassy, witnesses said. The target of the attack was unclear. Shiite Houthi rebels have a military position in the area, witnesses said.
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