Suicide bomber kills UAE-backed fighters in Aden

ADEN - A suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed three fighters allied to the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) on Friday on the outskirts of the Yemeni city of Aden, the site of a surge of violence that had complicated the near five-year-old war and undermined peace efforts.

In a separate attack on Friday, the military head of the UAE-backed Security Belt force - the military wing of the STC which is part of a southern front fighting Yemeni government forces - survived a roadside bomb attack on his convoy in central Aden that wounded five of his guards, sources said.

The STC and the government were once allies in Yemen's broader war, being both part of a Saudi-led coalition battling the Iran-aligned Huthi rebel movement, which took over most of Yemen's cities in 2014.

But the STC broke with the government this month, accused it of ties to Islamists and seized its temporary base of Aden on Aug. 10.

The rift has exposed deep rifts in the coalition - the Saudis back the government while the United Arab Emirates, the alliance's second-biggest backer, funds and arms Security Belt and other southern forces.

It has also inflamed old tensions between north and south Yemen - formerly separate countries that united into a single state in 1990 under then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Four years later, an armed secession bid ended in occupation by northern forces, giving rise to resentments which persist to this day. The STC is demanding that Islamists allied to the government and other "northerners" be removed from positions of power in Yemen's southern regions.

Raising the stakes

The 3 STC fighters were killed in Aden's northern Dar Saad neighbourhood when, "a suicide bomber crashed his bomb-laden motorbike into a vehicle of the Southern Transitional Council on a roundabout in the Sheikh Saad district" of northern Aden, according to Yemeni sources.

Three of those on board the vehicle were killed and an unknown number wounded, including civilians near a busy marketplace.

A security official blamed the suicide bombing, for which there was no immediate claim of responsibility, on Al-Qaeda, although the Islamic State terrorist group later released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack.

The bombing wounded and killed "members of the Security Belt... in an explosion of a motorbike-borne device in the Saad area of Aden," IS said via its propaganda arm Amaq

The attack came a day after the UAE raised the stakes in the southern standoff by carrying out air strikes against government forces in southern Yemen. The UAE said it had carried out "precise and direct" strikes on Thursday on what it called terrorist militias which it said had attacked Saudi-led coalition forces fighting at Aden's airport.

Yemen's government condemned the strikes which it said had killed and wounded more than 300 of its forces and a number of civilians.

Other parts of Aden were largely quiet on Friday after days of heavy fighting, with shops, restaurants and bakeries reopening and people attending Friday prayers.

The Saudi-led, Sunni Muslim coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 against the Houthis, who ousted President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's government from power in the capital Sanaa. Divisions have spread in a war which is widely seen as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and its regional rival Iran.

"The recent escalation of violence in Aden is a clear indication that once more, political and military interests are overriding the well-being and safety of the Yemeni people," Jason Lee, Acting Country Director of Save the Children in Yemen, said in a statement.