Coalition officials have said they aim to move north to retake Sana’a from the Houthis, who are backed by former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Advertisement
Strikes hit the command of the special security forces and camps of Saleh as well as the presidential complex.
Also targeted were Huthi positions in the northern neighbourhoods of Sufan and Al-Nahda, forcing scores of residents to flee, the witnesses said.
Last Friday, a Houthi attack on a weapons depot in Marib claimed the lives of 60 soldiers from the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi and Yemen. Both the Saudi coalition and the Houthi militia have been accused of committing war crimes by human rights groups.
The coalition is trying to restore the exiled president, who left as the Houthis gained control over much of the country.
Among the targets, the Defense Ministry building in Sanaa was very heavily damaged, residents said.
Friday’s losses marked the heaviest since the UAE’s foundation as an independent state in 1971.
The bodies of the Emirati soldiers killed in the attack on their base in Marib were taken to the UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi aboard an air force transport plane.
He also shared the grief of the brotherly peoples and the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Kingdom of Bahrain over the attack on their soldiers.
The rebels struck on Friday, with a missile attack on a weapons storage facility in Marib province.
The province is the location of Yemen’s main oil fields and has seen fierce fighting in recent weeks as loyalist forces and their coalition allies have advanced north.
The United Arab Emirates says it has inflicted heavy losses on Houthi fighters a day after losing 45 of its own troops in a missile strike.
According to Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV, at least a thousand Qatari soldiers have crossed the Saudi-Yemeni border at al Wadia, with around 200 armoured vehicles.
The broader ground offensive follows five months of coalition airstrikes as it seeks to restore Hadi to power. The rebels, known as the Houthis, say they have suffered from discrimination by successive Yemeni governments.
Western diplomats and analysts have expressed skepticism about the level of Iranian involvement in Yemen’s conflict, the primary motivation for the Gulf states’ involvement.
Advertisement
More than 4,500 people have been killed and 23,000 injured by fighting on the ground and in Saudi-led air strikes since March.
