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| Arabia |
| 'Dozens dead' in Yemen festivities |
| 2008-05-13 |
| Dozens of people have been killed or wounded in renewed clashes between the Yemen army and Shiite rebels in the north-west of the country, tribal sources said. "Fighting killed or wounded dozens of people, including many civilians," on Sunday and Monday in several regions across the Shiite Zaidi rebel stronghold of Saada, one source said. A member of Parliament said that the fighting erupted a day after Qatari mediators left the north-western province after failing to stop the violence. The Qatari mediation aimed at implementing a peace deal brokered in June 2007 "is at a dead end," said MP Ali Abou Haliqa, who heads a committee set up by Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh to monitor the deal. The Defence Ministry in a statement accused the rebels of "not respecting" the Doha peace accord. "The state will have to assume its responsibilities to maintain order," it said. The rebels are fighting to restore a Zaidi Shiite imamate which was overthrown in a 1962 republican coup in Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries. An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Zaidis are a minority in the mainly Sunni country but are the majority community in the far north. Thousands of people have been killed in the conflict since 2004, when rebel commander Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi was killed by the army. The rebels reject Saleh's regime as illegitimate, even though President Saleh himself is a Zaidi. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 I smell yet another Sunni-Shiite proxy war. We'll sit this one out. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-05-13 12:56 |