Yemen’s President Flees Residence
March 25th, 2015Via: AP:
Yemen’s embattled president fled his palace home in the southern port city of Aden for an undisclosed location Wednesday as Shiite rebels closed in on the country’s third-largest city and launched airstrikes targeting the presidential forces guarding the palace’s compound.
President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi left the palace just hours after the rebels, known as the Houthis, and their allies seized a key air base where U.S. troops and Europeans had advised the country in its fight against al-Qaida militants. The base is only 60 kilometers (35 miles) away from Aden, where Hadi had established a temporary capital after fleeing from house arrest at the hands of the rebels in Sanaa earlier in March.
The rebels offered a bounty for Hadi’s capture and arrested his defense minister. Hours later, they launched airstrikes targeting presidential forces guarding the palace.
The advance of the rebels, empowered by the backing of the ousted Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh and his loyalists, threatens to plunge the Arab world’s poorest country into a civil war that could draw in its Gulf neighbors. Already, Hadi has asked the United Nations to authorize a foreign military intervention in Yemen.
