VOA – The United Nation’s envoy for Yemen is due to brief members of the Security Council on Tuesday, a day after rebels killed the country’s former president and their former ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and following a spike in violence in the capital with the dissolution of their alliance.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters he expected envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed to discuss the political implications of Saleh’s killing.
“It obviously adds an extreme level of complexity to already a very difficult political situation,” Dujarric said. He reiterated that the world body stands ready to broker a negotiated halt to the conflict that has left 10,000 people dead and millions in desperate need of humanitarian aid in Yemen since 2014.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Jamie McGoldrick, called for a humanitarian cease-fire on Tuesday to allow civilians to seek assistance.
“The streets of Sana’a city have become battlegrounds and people are trapped in their homes, unable to move out in search of safety and medical care and to access basic supplies such as food, fuel and safe water,” McGoldrick said in a statement.
Saleh ruled Yemen for more than three decades before he was ousted under popular and political pressure in 2012, but continued to wield power behind the scenes, forming an alliance with the Iran-backed Houthis as they seized control of Sana’a in 2014 and forced President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi into exile.
Saleh’s death Monday capped a dramatic stretch of days that followed him denouncing the Houthis and suggesting restoring ties with Saudi Arabia, which for two years has led a military coalition in support of Hadi.
“He was martyred in the defense of the republic,” said Faiqa al-Sayyid, a leader of the General People’s Congress, blaming Houthi rebels for Saleh’s killing in south Sana’a.
The rebels said Saleh was on his way to Saudi Arabia when he was killed, calling his death the foiling of what they claim was his attempt at a “coup” against “an alliance he never believed in.”
In a televised speech, Houthi leader Abdul-Malek al-Houthi called Saleh’s killing a “dark day for the forces of the coalition.”
Hadi, in his own address from Saudi Arabia, called on Yemeni people in Houthi-controlled areas to rise up against the rebels.
Clashes between fighters loyal to Saleh and the Houthis first erupted last week when Saleh accused the rebels of storming his giant mosque in Sana’a and attacking his nephew, the powerful commander of the special forces, Tarek Saleh.
Middle East Institute scholar Zubair Iqbal told VOA that Saleh went too far in supporting the group led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and wrongly expected those countries to provide forces to reinforce his own.
“Now the Houthis will never agree to anything that comes from the side of Saleh or his family or his friends,” Iqbal said.
Victor Beattie in Washington contributed to this report