Fierce clashes resumed on Saturday in Yemen’s southern port of Aden between nominally allied forces that have turned on each other, exposing rifts in a pro-government military coalition and complicating U.N. efforts to end the country’s war.
The New York Times reports that the deadly fighting between government forces and separatists escalated in the southern Yemeni city of Aden on Friday, driving a wedge through their fragile alliance and threatening to exacerbate the country’s multisided civil war.
The clashes in Aden, where the internationally recognized government is now based, are akin to a small civil war inside the larger one that split the country nearly five years ago, killing tens of thousands of people and plunging Yemen into what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The fighting that broke out on Wednesday has been between two groups that are nominally allies: the separatists, who aspire to make southern Yemen independent, and the forces loyal to Yemen’s exiled president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Throughout the war, the two groups have been part of a Sunni coalition fighting the Houthi rebels, who practice an offshoot of Shiite Islam and have taken over the country’s northwest.
