A Top army general loyal to Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour said on Tuesday that dozens of Al Houthis were killed in clashes with government forces backed Saudi-led coalition warplanes.

Speaking to Gulf News by telephone from Marib, Major Mohsen Khasrouf, the chief of Yemen’s Armed Forces Moral Guidance Department, said that rebel forces staged on Monday an assault on positions controlled by the government forces in Serwah city, setting off deadly clashes that claimed the lives of at least 35 of them.

“The government forces ambushed Al Houthis in a location near downtown Serwah. The bodies of their fighters are still scattered in the area,” Khasrouf said.

Serwah, Al Houthi’s last bastion in Marib, has seen the deadliest clashes of the war since early 2015. Government forces seek to liberate Serwah from Al Houthis to secure city of Marib, which hosts thousand of government and coalition troops and some government officials, from rebels’ rockets. Khasrouf said that most of the city’s areas are under government forces control and it was turned into a ground for wearing down Al Houthi power. “As many as 15 of their fighters die everyday in Serwah either in direct clashes or in shelling.”

Precision air strikes by the coalition’s fighter jets have also claimed dozens of the rebels in the same front line, said Khasrouf. Heavy clashes continued to rage in areas close of the town of Khokha on the Red Sea as the government forces push to make major advances towards Al Houthi-held Hodeida city, the last major coastal city under rebels’ control

An international rights group on Tuesday accused Al Houthi movement of recruiting children and despatching them into the front lines to battle government troops. Amnesty International said in a statement that the rebels have enlisted boys aged roughly 15 in their forces battling government forces or Saudi-led coalition forces along the Saudi border with Yemen.

Samah Hadid, Deputy Director at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office, said in the statement: “This is a shameful and outrageous violation of international law. The Al Houthis must immediately end all forms of recruitment of children under 18 and release all children within their ranks.”

The right group said Al Houthi followers in the capital recently bussed the targeted children from their homes in the capital to military sites for training. Some families were later informed by the rebels that their children are “at an unnamed location on the Yemeni-Saudi border”, the group said.

Yemen President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi touched down in the Saudi capital on Monday, for the second time in less than two weeks, the official Saba news agency said. On Monday, Hadi briefly visited Abu Dhabi where he was received by chief of UAE intelligence Major General Ali Mohammad Al Shamsi. On February 22, Hadi announced that Saudi Arabia allocated $10 billion in aid for reconstruction of liberated provinces

source : gulfnews