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The Iran-backed Houthi rebels are advancing on the Yemeni city of Taiz, the country’s third-largest metropolis that had endured a yearslong siege during the nation’s bloody civil war.
The terror group encircled the city on Tuesday, with its fighters clashing with the Saudi-back coalition troops on multiple fronts, officials said.
The Houthis have already managed to cut off most supply routes from government-held areas around the city, stoking fears among Taiz’s more than 1 million residents dealing with dwindling food and energy stocks.
“If the siege continues, then these stocks will run out,” local Shaif al-Gabiri told the Associated Press.
The main roads out of the city are now closed as pro-government forces attempt to break the rebel’s stronghold just southwest of Taiz.
Residents have reported shelling and blasts near their homes, with one 7-year-old boy hospitalized after he was reportedly hit by shrapnel.
Dr. Fahd Nazary, of the Taiz provincial health office, warned of a “huge catastrophe” to come as hospitals face a diesel shortage, with the fighting also cutting off access to medical supplies.
The situation harkens back to Yemen’s civil war period from 2014 to 2022, where the city stood in the frontlines against the Houthi rebel assault.
Taiz lies as a strategic gateway to the nation’s southern half, controlled by the Houthis, but its ability to repel the rebel forces appears to have waned in the face of the new assault.
By Tuesday night, the rebels seized Taiz’s central prison and reached the city’s eastern and western gates, local sources told The Telegraph.
Heavy fighting still persists at the southern gate and around the Jabal al-Aroos Mountain, one of the city’s most important defensive positions.
Some of the commanders and politicians in the Saudi-backed coalition have allegedly slipped out of town and sought refuge in Aden and Marib, accepting that the city has been lost, The Telegraph reported.
Houthi officials, believing the city will soon fall to their forces, claimed they would oversee normalization and vowed to reopen roads and end the fuel shortage once they’re in charge.
Mustafa Noman, the deputy foreign minister of Yemen’s Saudi-backed government, slammed the Houthis as arrogant and predicted that the siege on Taiz would fail.
“The siege of Taiz today will break sooner or later, and it will form a turning point in Yemen’s history,” he said.
Should the city fall, it would mark yet another victory for the Houthis amid their lightning offensive around the country that has come to threaten global oil supplies and the Yemeni government’s backers in Saudi Arabia.
With Post Wires