Rising chaos grips Yemen

SANAA, YEMEN - Yemen edged closer to civil war Wednesday as government troops waged increasingly bloody street battles with opposition tribesmen for control of crucial areas in the capital.

Some estimates of the death toll in fighting late Tuesday and early Wednesday ranged as high as 41 on both sides. All told, at least 120 people have been killed since the violence began early last week. A brief cease-fire struck over the weekend collapsed Tuesday, with each side blaming the other.

The violence has transformed a largely peaceful uprising into a tribal conflict with no clear end in sight. The United States and Yemen's Arab neighbors such as Saudi Arabia are reduced to sitting on the sidelines and pleading for restraint. They have tried and failed to mediate a peaceful solution to the country's political crisis.

The bloodshed also threatens to unleash a humanitarian catastrophe as Yemen, already the poorest country in the Arab world, runs desperately low on gasoline, cooking oil and other basic supplies. It raises fears, too, that Islamic militants who use Yemen as a base will have even freer rein to operate.

The rising chaos has become a major concern for the White House, which announced Wednesday that John Brennan, President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, would be traveling to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates this week to discuss "the deteriorating situation in Yemen."

Residents flee capital

On Wednesday afternoon, tanks and armored vehicles could be seen rolling from the south into Sanaa, the capital. The streets were largely empty as many residents fled to surrounding villages. Exploding artillery shells and sporadic machine-gun fire could be heard across the city.

Witnesses said units of the elite Presidential Guard, commanded by one of Saleh's sons, shelled the headquarters of an army brigade that guards government institutions, sending up columns of smoke. Army officers who have joined the opposition said they believed the move was a preemptive strike against a commander who the government feared would join the movement to oust Saleh.

"This is the worst fighting we have seen since 1994," when Yemen fought a two-month civil war, said one Yemeni official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under diplomatic protocol. "And it's the worst fighting in Sanaa since the civil war of the 1960s."

In recent days, the government's tenuous hold has slipped further outside the capital as tribal fighters and Islamist militants seized a major coastal town in the south and tribesmen took over critical checkpoints east of Sanaa. The southern city of Taiz remained in a state of lockdown, days after government forces and gunmen opened fire on a vast crowd of peaceful protesters who had been holding a sit-in for months. Dozens were killed, according to witnesses and human rights groups.

In the capital, government security forces have tried in recent days to disrupt a similar peaceful sit-in by protesters that has lasted for months. But Maj. Gen. Ali Moshin al-Ahmar's troops have protected them. Most of the protesters in Sanaa and in cities across Yemen have held fast to their belief in nonviolent resistance, but some have begun to call for war against Saleh, especially after the massacre in Taiz.

"For me and others like me here in the square, we are convinced that peaceful means would not work, since they did not work over these last four months," said Ahmed Obadi, a young protester and teacher.

The latest round of fighting in Sanaa broke out May 23, a day after Saleh refused for a third time to sign an agreement for him to leave power in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Until now, the fighting in the capital had been focused on the Hasaba district, the site of the Ahmar family compound and a cluster of adjacent government buildings.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saleh's refusal to step down was prolonging the crisis. "We cannot expect this conflict to end unless President Saleh and his government move out of the way to permit the opposition and civil society to begin a transition to political and economic reform," she said in Washington.