ADEN // Houthi rebels pulled back from a central Aden district on Friday and warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition dropped weapons and medical aid to fighters defending the southern Yemen city.
Meanwhile, two more Saudi soldiers were killed on Friday along the countries’ shared border.
“Two soldiers from the border guards were martyred during an exchange of fire at a border point in Asir region” in Saudi Arabia’s south-west, said a spokesman for the country’s interior ministry, cited by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The deaths came a day after the ministry announced Saudi Arabia’s first casualty since the kingdom launched a coalition against the Houthis on March 26.
The Shiite rebels and their allies withdrew from the Crater neighbourhood as well as one of Aden’s presidential residences which they seized a day earlier, residents and a local official said on Friday.
Their withdrawal followed overnight clashes and an airstrike on the presidential palace at Maashiq, overlooking Crater. At least one Houthi tank was destroyed and another taken over by president Abrabu Mansur Hadi’s loyalists, they said.
Aden residents said the streets of Crater neighbourhood, deserted on Thursday after the Houthis swept in, were busy again on Friday after the attackers pulled back to the adjacent district of Khor Maksar.
Early on Friday warplanes from the coalition dropped crates of weapons and medical supplies by parachute over Tawahi, a district on the far end of the Aden peninsula which is still held by Mr Hadi loyalists, fighters said.
The crates included light weapons, telecommunications equipment and rocket-propelled grenades. The pro-Hadi newspaper Aden Al Ghad published pictures of at least one wooden crate attached to a parachute, which it said had landed in Aden. Local men were seen loading the crates on to pickup trucks.
The Iranian-allied Houthis, fighting alongside soldiers loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, emerged as the strongest force in Yemen after they took over the capital Sanaa in September.
Last month they advanced on Aden, where Mr Hadi had retreated, prompting the launch of the air campaign by the Saudi-led coalition. Nine days of air strikes have destroyed much of the rebels’ equipment and cut off any chance of outside reinforcement, but failed to halt their march on the port city.
Mr Hadi fled Aden last week and has watched from neighbouring Saudi Arabia as the vestiges of his authority on the ground have eroded as the Houthis advanced.
The coalition, which is trying to reassert Mr Hadi’s authority as a prelude to political negotiations, has repeatedly said that sending ground troops into Yemen remains an option but not an automatic move.
Officials have declined to say whether special forces have already deployed. The Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel Al Jubeir said on Thursday that the kingdom did not have “formal” troops on the ground in Aden.
Saudi Arabia says it has support from four other Gulf Arab states as well as Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan and Pakistan, though it has not spelt out the details of their participation.
The United States has promised support for the Saudi-led campaign and a senior US military official said on Thursday that it would provide aerial refuelling for the coalition jets but was not passing on precise information for air raids.
The official said the US military’s Central Command had been given the green light to deploy refuelling tankers for the Saudis and their Gulf partners in the operation, though the refuelling would take place outside of Yemen’s airspace.
The US was also delivering intelligence from surveillance satellites and aircraft to help the Saudis monitor their border and to track the location of Houthi forces as they push south, the official said.
The intelligence was helping create “a battlefield picture” of where the Houthis were deployed and to “understand what’s happening on their border”, the official said.
“They’re looking for evidence of any Houthi ground incursions.”
Tribal sources in Yemen said on Friday that Saudi Arabia had started to remove parts of a fence along its border with the north-western Yemeni provinces of Saada, the Houthi stronghold, and Hajja.
This could be a prelude to an incursion by ground troops, but may also be part of more modest efforts to secure the frontier area, which on some stretches includes a buffer zone between the two countries.
US government sources said on Thursday that, although Washington believes Saudi Arabia and its allies have deployed a military force along the border which is large enough to launch a full-scale invasion, there was no indication that Riyadh was planning any such invasion soon.
The war on the Houthis is now the biggest of several conflicts being fought out in Yemen, which is also grappling with a southern secessionist movement, tribal unrest and a powerful regional wing of Al Qaeda.
The fighting forced Washington to evacuate personnel from the country, a main battlefield in its drone war against Al Qaeda – although a US military officer said he believed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was now more focused on addressing the Houthi offensive than plotting attacks abroad.
Suspected Al Qaeda fighters stormed a jail in Yemen’s Arabian Sea city of Mukalla on Thursday, freeing at least 150 prisoners including a prominent local leader of the global jihadi movement, Khalid Batarfi, residents said.
The Sunni Al Qaeda fighters are fiercely opposed to the Houthis, who are drawn from a Zaidi Shiite minority that ruled a 1,000-year kingdom in northern Yemen until 1962.
Mr Saleh himself is a member of the sect but fought to crush the Houthis as president. Huge street demonstrations in 2011 linked to wider Arab uprisings forced him to step down, but he has re-emerged as an influential force by allying himself with the Houthis, his former enemies.
The civil war in Yemen has forced many countries to evacuate their citizens. China, which had already pulled its nationals out of Yemen, sent a frigate on Thursday to rescue 255 people from 10 different countries from Aden.
This was the first time that China’s military has helped other countries evacuate their people during an international crisis.
Turkey said on Friday that a naval frigate had evacuated 55 Turkish citizens from Aden. Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara could give logistical and intelligence support, but that it wanted to see a political solution.
* Reuters with additional reporting from Agence France-Presse