More than 140 combatants killed in a day of fighting in southwest Yemen, both sides say
Yemen Herald News 
TAIZ, Yemen — More than 140 combatants were killed in southwest Yemen between midday Saturday and early Sunday, military sources on both sides told Agence France-Presse.
Two military officials with the internationally recognised government said 84 of their troops died in that period, mostly in missile attacks.
Four Houthi military sources put their own losses at 57 fighters over the same hours.
The two counts were gathered separately by the agency. Neither side has published a figure for the other’s losses.
By Sunday the cumulative toll had passed 300 combatants and some civilians, according to an AFP tally compiled from military and medical sources on both sides.
The fighting followed the collapse in July of a ceasefire that had held between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government since 2022.
The Houthis opened the offensive on Thursday. Their aim, according to government military officials, was to cut off the government-held port city of Mokha and push toward the areas bordering the Bab al-Mandab strait.
Mokha had been under fire for weeks before the assault began. The port lies on the Red Sea coast in Taiz governorate, north of the Bab al-Mandab strait.
A government military official said the Houthis succeeded on Saturday evening in cutting the road linking Taiz to Mokha. The Houthi movement has not published its own account of that advance.
Another official with the Aden-based government said the fighting subsided in the early hours of Sunday.
He said government forces “were able to establish positions for themselves north of Hays after advancing in the area.” Hays is a frontline district less than 30 kilometres inland from the Red Sea coast.
The same official said the Houthis had advanced west of Taiz, south of Hays, in their push toward Bab al-Mandab. Both claims rest on the government’s own account, and no independent confirmation of either position has been published.
Al Jazeera reported on Sunday that Yemeni government forces said they had taken a district on the southwestern front as the clashes intensified.
Yemen’s National Resistance said its units repelled the Houthi push and opened a counter-offensive, the news site Yemen Monitor reported. That account comes from the force itself.
An earlier stage of the escalation killed 13 government troops, Al-Monitor reported.
Civilians moved ahead of the front lines. Families fleeing the Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi districts of Taiz governorate reached Al-Bareen camp for the internally displaced on Saturday.
On Sunday, AFP journalists saw displaced people setting up shelters at another camp in the area, carrying mattresses, livestock and other belongings.
“The shooting came at us from above and from below,” said Rawdhah Hasan, a woman displaced from Maqbanah. “They surrounded us from every direction, we fled with our children without even putting on our shoes.”
Nimah Saif, displaced from Jabal Habashi, said she had seen casualties on the ground as her family left.
“Some people were injured and others were killed. We saw them lying on the ground, but we could not help anyone,” she said. “Now we are stranded here, hungry, with nothing to eat.”
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Friday that an estimated 1,790 households had been displaced after what it described as intense shelling and clashes in Maqbanah and Jabal Habashi.
A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply concerned by the ongoing military clashes,” warning of “devastating political economic and security ramifications for Yemen and its people.”
Farea Al-Muslimi, a Middle East researcher at the London-based institute Chatham House, said the Houthis were seeking to exploit a weak front line at Mokha.
The aim, he said, was to “cut a lot of ties between Taiz and Bab al-Mandab and Mokha.” He added: “If they have a chance to fully take over Bab al-Mandab, they won’t hesitate for a second.”
Adam Baron, a fellow at the US-based research group New America, said the offensive had “shattered much of what was left of Yemen’s tenuous ceasefire.”
“Things increasingly appear to be on a path to escalation with few potential off-ramps,” Baron said.
Bab al-Mandab sits at the southern entrance to the Red Sea and carries traffic between Asia and Europe by way of the Suez Canal. Its importance as a transit route rose after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping.
The 2022 truce broke down in July after the Houthis welcomed an Iranian aircraft to Sanaa, the capital they have held since 2014, setting off a series of attacks.
The Houthis have controlled Sanaa and much of northern Yemen since 2014. The internationally recognised government has been based in Aden.
The UN humanitarian response plan for Yemen, published in March, counted more than 22 million people in need of assistance across the country, 18.3 million of them acutely food insecure. It recorded 5.2 million internally displaced and sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million people.
The plan was drawn up before the July collapse of the ceasefire and does not account for displacement from the current fighting.
The Houthis have since announced a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia and have begun striking Saudi ships and territory.
An earlier AFP count during the same offensive put the number of dead at more than 120.
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