Forty-five soldiers from the United Arab Emirates’ military and five troops from Bahrain have been killed while taking part in a Saudi-led military campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, in the deadliest day for Gulf forces since the conflict began. Pro-government Yemeni security officials said the UAE troops were killed on Friday when a Houthi missile hit a weapons storage depot near their position in the province of Maarib, about 120km east of the capital Sanaa. Aljazeera has more:
The UAE state news agency WAM initially put the death toll at 22 but updated it to 45 late on Friday. Officials from the Houthi media office in Sanaa confirmed a Soviet-era Tochka missile was fired at the site. The office of Yemen’s exiled president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, said that Yemeni troops had also died in the incident, without giving numbers.
The UAE has declared a three-day period of mourning for the soldiers. President Sheikh Khalifa “mourned the brave Emirati soldiers who were killed in Maarib in Yemen in defence of truth and justice,” state news agency Wam reported. In a separate development on Friday, Bahrain, another Gulf country involved in the coalition’s conflict against Houthi fighters, announced that five of its soldiers were killed in southern Saudi Arabia where they had been posted to help defend the Saudi border. It did not give a precise location.
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