Shabwa News

Yemen's Houthi group is piling on pressure to extract economic gains in U.N.-led talks for an extended truce deal with attacks on oil ports in government-held areas, which officials say have disrupted crude exports, choking state revenues.Yemen's foreign ministry said in a statement that the Houthis launched a drone attack on the southern Qena port in Shabwa on Wednesday. The group's military spokesman said on Twitter that the operation "foiled an attempt to loot" Yemen's oil by preventing a vessel from docking.A joint statement by the U.S.…

Twenty-two Ethiopian migrants are missing after being dumped in the sea off Yemen, the U.N. International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday. IOM spokesman Joel Millman said the missing people were on one of four boats that brought 602 Ethiopian men and women to the coast of Yemen's Shabwa governorate in the past 24 hours. "We understand that passengers on the boat had been dropped into deep water and forced to swim to shore. No bodies have been recovered but 22 remain unaccounted for," Millman told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva. He gave no further details of the incident. "Despite the difficult security problems in Yemen, it's still a migrant transit point and we're still hearing about these reports pretty frequently," he said.

More than 10,000 people killed in Yemeni conflict. The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said on Wednesday it would keep Yemen's Houthi-controlled Hodeidah port open for a month, despite a fresh missile attack at Riyadh, but it kept up air strikes that killed at least nine people. The Western-backed coalition, which controls Yemen's airspace and port access, said last month it would allow humanitarian aid through Hodeidah following a nearly three-week blockade imposed because of a missile attack towards the Saudi capital's international airport. The Saudis say the Red Sea port, which is Yemen's main entry point for food and humanitarian supplies, is also a hub used by the Iran-allied Houthi rebels to bring in weapons.

Some 180 young Ethiopian and Somali migrants, many weakened by hunger and drought in their home countries, were forced from a boat into rough seas off Yemen by smugglers on Thursday and 55 were presumed to have drowned, the U.N. migration agency said. It was the second such incident in as many days off Shabwa province in southern Yemen, where 50 teenage African migrants were "deliberately drowned" on Wednesday by a smuggler who forced 120 passengers off his boat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said. Smugglers were pushing migrants into the sea away from the mainland so as to avoid encountering possibly armed groups on shore in the war-torn country. They were then going back to pick up more migrants. "We have seen five bodies and can confirm five dead ...

Suspected al Qaeda militants killed four Yemeni soldiers in their sleep early on Sunday in an attack on forces guarding the country's only liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal, a local official told Reuters. The assault follows an escalating campaign of drone strikes by the United States over the past two weeks and warnings of militant attacks that prompted Washington to close embassies across the Middle East and evacuate some staff from Yemen. Citing an official at the terminal, Reuters report that the gunmen infiltrated a checkpoint guarding the Balhaf LNG terminal in the southern Shabwa province, killed one soldier and then entered a cargo container where four more troops were sleeping and shot them dead before fleeing in a vehicle. Source: Reuters