Soldiers regained control of a besieged southern town from Al-Qaeda, Yemeni authorities said yesterday, as militants staged a dawn attack on a bus in the capital, wounding 10 intelligence agents.
“Security forces backed by army units succeeded on Friday to clear out the city of Huta where Al-Qaeda terrorist elements were holed up” since September 18, an interior ministry spokesman said.
Forces were now pursuing “terrorist elements who fled to the mountains surrounding the city,” added the spokesman, whose statement was carried by the official Saba news agency.
The military’s reported advances in the south were followed by a setback in Sanaa, however, when two unidentified gunmen in the northwest of the city ambushed a bus taking intelligence agents to work at dawn yesterday.
The attackers fired automatic weapons at the bus before fleeing, security services said, adding that they were probably militants of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
The wounded were taken to hospital, where a medical official said two were in a serious condition.
Four suspects thought to have been involved in the attack were detained during a wave of arrests in Sanaa later yesterday, a security official told AFP.
Last Wednesday, Yemeni troops had said they were preparing to launch an offensive against militants entrenched in Huta and nearby mountains.
The siege of the Shabwa provincial town had already sparked a mass exodus of civilians, with between 8,000 and 12,000 of its 20,000 residents fleeing by Tuesday, the Yemeni Red Crescent said.
Displaced residents began returning to Huta yesterday.
“I’m just outside the city,” said Saleh Aram, who was hoping to return home with his wife and six children.
“But we are very afraid,” he added, describing the military deployment in the town as “unprecedented“.
Seven people were killed in the Huta clashes – three suspected Al-Qaeda militants, three soldiers and a tribal leader – local officials said.
Twenty-eight Al-Qaeda suspects were also arrested in the town, Shabwa security chief Ahmed al-Maqdashi said on Wednesday.
A Yemeni security official had earlier said Al-Qaeda fighters were stopping people from leaving with a view to using them as human shields.
“I’m surprised at official statements that the fighters have fled to the mountains and to unknown destinations. How did they flee?” if Huta was under siege, one local tribal chief who asked not to be identified told AFP yesterday.
Huta is one of two Yemeni towns to have been attacked by suspected Al-Qaeda militants in the past month.
In late August, government forces and alleged Al-Qaeda members fought a pitched battle in the town of Loder in neighbouring Abyan province that killed at least 33 people, including 19 militants.
Britain warned last Friday of “massive dangers” to world security should Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country and increasingly an Al-Qaeda stronghold, become a failed state.
The situation in Yemen was described as “a very potent cocktail for danger” by Britain’s international development minister Alan Duncan at UN headquarters in New York.
He was speaking at the latest meeting of international support group the Friends of Yemen.
Sanaa has intensified its operations against Al-Qaeda since AQAP claimed responsibility for a botched attack on US-bound airliner on Christmas Day last year.
Yemen, which is also battling a sporadic Shiite rebellion in the north, is the ancestral homeland of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and has seen repeated attacks by his jihadist network.
The formerly independent south has also witnessed growing discontent with the Sanaa government spearheaded by a coalition of secessionist and autonomist groups dubbed the Southern Movement, which denies any connection with Al-Qaeda.
One of its exiled leaders, Ali Salem al-Baid, had described the campaign against the militants in Huta as a government attempt to secure funding from foreign donors at the Friends of Yemen meeting.