Yemen’s Prime Minister, Khaled Bahah, escaped unharmed from the attack on the Qasr hotel in Aden, and several people had been killed and injured.
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A rocket-propelled grenade hit a hotel in the Yemeni city of Aden that houses members of deposed President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi’s government, officials said.
Amnesty said in a report (PDF) that it had examined 13 deadly air strikes by the coalition that had killed about 100 civilians, including 59 children in Yemen.
The suicide bombers in Aden were driving Yemeni army vehicles, a Yemeni military source told Reuters.
Claiming responsibility for the Sanaa bombing, The Islamic State said in a statement that dozens of Houthis preparing to go to the battlefront had been killed or wounded. “Their role on the ground has been reduced so they resort to mines, ambushes and rockets”, he said on his official Twitter account.
Local media reports said the victims included one Saudi and three Emirati soldiers.
The Sunni militant Islamic State is hostile to both the U.S.-backed Yemeni government and its Arab coalition allies, as well as the Shi’ite Muslim Iran-backed Houthis rebels in Yemen’s complex war.
“Today’s attacks were not a surprise”, Ms. Zimmerman said.
Bahah and his ministers were installed in Aden – declared Yemen’s provisional capital after it was taken back from Iran-allied Shia Houthi fighters in mid-July – after they spent six months in exile in Saudi Arabia.
“You’ll have the (southern) secessionists fighting al-Qaeda, and ISIL fighting al-Qaeda at the same time…It will be a complete nightmare scenario in the near future”.
Senior officials including the vice president are said to be unhurt by the attack, while the deposed president Hadi is said to be outside the country. The Islamic State also released pictures and names of the assailants who carried out the attacks, which Yemeni authorities say killed at least 15 people.
“The coalition losses are still relatively small for this sort of war”, Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of Cornerstone Global Associates, which advises clients on risk in the Middle East, said by phone.
It is the first attack against Yemeni government and Arab coalition by the IS, which has launched a series of suicide attacks against the coalition’s arch foe, the Shiite Houthi group.
The assault comes after a missile attack on an ammunition depot at the Emirati forward operating base at Saffer in Marib province on September 4 killed 52 Emirati troops, as well as at least 10 soldiers from Saudi Arabia and five from Bahrain.
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Loyalists last week retook control of the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait, which separates Yemen from Djibouti a few 32 kilometres (20 miles) away and funnels shipping to and from the Suez Canal at the north end of the Red Sea.
