Fighting flared on several fronts in Yemen on Thursday, as government-aligned forces said they had beaten back a fresh Houthi assault on the outskirts of Taiz, the strategic southwestern city that has lived under rebel siege for nearly a decade.
The clash unfolded as part of a broader campaign the government has named « Fajr al-Yaman, » or Dawn of Yemen, aimed at loosening the Houthi grip around Taiz. Military sources cited by local outlets reported artillery exchanges and skirmishes along multiple front lines through the day.
Yemen’s internationally recognized government renewed its call on the United Nations and the Security Council to take urgent action to lift the siege, which has throttled the city for years and left hundreds of thousands of residents struggling for water, medical care and food supplies.
Separately, satellite imagery released Thursday showed extensive damage to two fuel facilities in Houthi-held Sanaa, the latest sign of a widening military escalation between the Saudi-led coalition and the rebel movement.
That escalation has been building since early October. Between the 5th and the 11th, a wave of attacks blamed on the Houthis struck five Saudi airports, including King Khalid International in Riyadh, which was hit five separate times. The combined toll stands at roughly twenty dead and hundreds wounded, with significant disruption to air traffic across the kingdom.
The deteriorating security picture has already had diplomatic fallout: a planned Gulf-European summit in Riyadh, meant to bring together Gulf leaders and their European counterparts, has been postponed, underscoring how far the shockwaves from the latest violence have spread across the region.
Yemen has been mired in conflict since 2014, when the Houthis seized Sanaa and large parts of the north, prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene the following year on behalf of the internationally recognized government. Years of on-and-off mediation have failed to bridge the trust gap between the warring sides, and it is civilians who continue to bear the heaviest cost of a war that shows few signs of ending.
