Riyadh, November 08: Saudi forces pounded Yemeni rebels on Saturday for a fifth straight day as Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh ruled out a truce in his war on the Shiite insurgents.
Huge smoke plumes could be seen rising above Jebel al-Dukhan, a 2,000-metre (6,600-foot) peak on the border near the town of Al-Khubah, a sign of continued bombing by Saudi fighter jets, residents said.
Saudi artillery shelled apparent rebel positions to the south, the residents said as medics reported seven Saudis and an unknown number of rebels had been killed since Tuesday.
“We’re coming to grips with these traitors, these renegades, and daily we are losing scores of martyrs from our best officers and soldiers and citizens,” Saleh said during a speech at Balhaf in the Gulf of Aden.
“But their blood is not being shed in vain and there will be no reconciliation, no truce nor stoppage to the war until we see the end of this small group of deviants,” he said without mentioning a Saudi incursion into Yemen on Wednesday.
Meanwhile there was no confirmation of rebel claims they had seized a number of Saudi soldiers.
“With Allah’s help, the Saudi tyrannical advance into Yemen’s territory has been defeated,” said a statement on the rebels’ website.
“A number of its troops have been captured and several military vehicles and supplies been seized.”
Signs of the continuing fight were present along the highway to Khuba, about 60 kilometres (35 miles) inland from the Red Sea coast.
Saudi medium- and long-range artillery pieces were in position, and soldiers patrolled the road and fields amid makeshift army camps.
Trucks laden with mattresses, chairs and other household goods plodded down the road away from the border, from where most of the population had been evacuated to tent camps earlier in the week.
But hospital staff in the nearby town of Samtah said they had not received any new casualties, after several dozen wounded soldiers were brought in the day before, most with gunshot or shrapnel wounds.
Altogether 126 wounded had been delivered to the hospital since Tuesday, when a band of Shiite Zaidi rebels, under siege from the government since August, crossed into Saudi Arabia and shot up a border post, killing one border guard and injuring 11 others.
The rebels said they had been fired at first by Saudi troops.
The rebels took control of two small border villages, both sides said. That outraged Riyadh and sparked a massive backlash of air power against rebel camps inside Yemen, according to a Saudi government adviser.
The rebels also reported Saudi forces had attacked inside Yemen territory, but both governments maintained that the Saudi actions had remained on the Saudi side of the border.
In the Samtah district hospital, doctors said besides the first border patrolman who had been killed Tuesday, four women civilians from the same family had died after their home was shelled, and on Friday two soldiers were killed in the fighting.
A doctor said Friday had been the “heaviest day” for casualties so far. “We had 50 wounded come in in just two hours,” one said.
A Zaidi rebel was one of the wounded in the hospital, his room guarded by soldiers with assault rifles.
According to the doctors, he had been shot after infiltrating disguised as a woman.
According to Saudi news reports, fighting flared Friday night after a number of rebels wearing women’s shroud-like black abayas sneaked into the Saudi border villages of Al-Qarn, Qawa and Al-Dafeneyah.
Local news website Jazannews.org said some 40 rebels had surrendered to Saudi forces.
The Saudi mobilisation and bombing marked Riyadh’s first overt involvement in Saana’s all-out offensive to put an end to the rebels five year old uprising in the mountainous north of the country, one of the world’s poorest.
Yemeni authorities accuse the rebels of seeking to restore the Zaidi imamate that ruled in Sanaa until its overthrow in a republican coup in 1962 that sparked eight years of civil war. The rebels deny the charge.
While Washington expressed concern about the expansion of the conflict, Saudi allies Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates all voiced support for the regional kingpin defending its territory against rebel incursions.
-Agencies