Yemeni joint forces say three soldiers killed repelling Houthi assault in Taiz
Yemen Herald News 
Fighting flared again along the al-Barh axis in Yemen’s south-western Taiz province this week, as Houthi units launched a coordinated assault on positions held by forces loyal to the internationally recognised government. Wadah al-Dubaish, spokesman for the joint forces, said three soldiers of the National Resistance were killed and seven others wounded as the attack was pushed back.
Al-Dubaish said the assault opened with sustained artillery fire before Houthi fighters tried to infiltrate defensive lines at several points along the front. National Resistance units answered with counter-attacks and ambushes on the approaches to their positions. The spokesman put Houthi losses at between 45 and 55 killed, wounded or missing, along with several destroyed military vehicles and items of support equipment. Those figures come from one side of the front line and have not been independently verified, and the Houthis have not issued a casualty count for the engagement.
The claim follows a wider tally issued by the same command earlier in the week. Government-aligned forces said strikes on the al-Barh front over three days killed more than 27 Houthi fighters and wounded 19, and that several Houthi military vehicles were set alight or disabled. A military source cited in regional reporting said the Houthis committed large numbers of fighters supported by artillery, mortar fire and drones, but that government troops detected the movement early enough to force a withdrawal.
Al-Barh sits in western Taiz, on the corridor linking the highlands around Taiz city to the Red Sea coastal plain. Whoever holds that ground shapes the movement of men and supplies between the coast and the interior, which is why the axis has been fought over repeatedly since government-aligned units pushed north from the Red Sea coast in 2018. Neither side has managed to convert local gains there into a durable shift in the wider front, and the pattern of assault, counter-attack and stalemate has repeated for years.
The Taiz clashes form part of the sharpest escalation Yemen has seen since a United Nations-brokered truce slowed the war in April 2022. That agreement was never converted into a political settlement, and while the front lines largely froze, they were never dismantled. Fighting has resumed over recent weeks across several governorates, including Marib, al-Jawf, al-Dhalea and Taiz, in what officials on both sides describe as the most serious deterioration in years.
Earlier in August, Houthi strikes on military camps in Marib and Hadramout killed at least 30 government soldiers, the deadliest single episode of the conflict in years. The Yemeni military said it carried out 181 operations against Houthi positions across several governorates over the weekend of 15 and 16 August, killing and wounding dozens of fighters. The Houthis acknowledged four dead without giving details of the circumstances.
The National Resistance, which holds the western Taiz front and the Red Sea coastal strip, is led by Tareq Saleh, a member of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council and a nephew of the late president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Its forces are based on the coast around Mokha and operate semi-independently of the regular army while remaining aligned with the internationally recognised government.
That geography matters this week because the same coastal command is under pressure from a second direction. Mokha port suspended commercial and maritime operations after being hit by more than 25 missiles in Houthi attacks, its director general, Abdulmalik al-Sharabi, said at a news conference. Those strikes killed seven people and caused an estimated 16 million dollars in losses. Sustained pressure on al-Barh and on Mokha places strain on the same force at both ends of its area of operations.
For civilians, the renewed fighting carries immediate costs. Taiz city, one of Yemen’s largest, has spent much of the war partly encircled, with main roads closed and residents pushed onto long detours through mountain tracks. Any tightening of the western approaches raises transport costs and slows the movement of food, fuel and medical supplies into a governorate that relief agencies already count among the country’s most stressed.
The economic backdrop compounds the risk. The Yemeni rial has lost much of its value in government-held areas over the course of the war, public salaries are paid irregularly, and United Nations relief agencies have repeatedly said their humanitarian appeal for Yemen remains severely underfunded. Renewed fighting tends to displace households from front-line districts at precisely the moment when aid organisations have the least capacity to absorb them, and displacement from the Taiz fronts has historically flowed towards already crowded areas of the coast and the city itself.
Taiz has been among the most consistently violent governorates of the war. The city has changed hands only at its margins since 2015, and the surrounding districts have absorbed repeated offensives from both directions without either side achieving a decisive breakthrough on the ground.
The escalation also coincides with heightened tension across the wider region, which has complicated efforts to revive talks. United Nations mediation has been stalled for months, and neither side has signalled a willingness to return to the negotiating table. For now the fighting at al-Barh remains a local engagement on a single axis. What worries observers is that a four-year lull had made engagements of this kind unusual, and their return suggests the truce that held them in check is no longer doing so.
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