Yemen forces kill protesters on second straight day

Al Jazeera reports that the crowds were fired on with heavy machine guns and mortars.

Yet despite the bloodshed, some protesters have no intention of giving up. "We will continue with our protests ... even if thousands of our youth are killed," Walid al-Ammari, a spokesman for the protesters, told AFP. "This is the only way to ensure the fall of the regime.”

Closer to civil war

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Saleh’s refusal to give up power or negotiate with the opposition is pushing the country closer to civil war. His return from Saudi Arabia last month emboldened both his supporters and the opposition, but neither side has the ability to triumph militarily or politically over the other. A civil war would be multidimensional and would be felt across the region, reports the Monitor.

Saleh has repeatedly agreed to, then refused, a deal backed by Saudi Arabia and the US, in which he would hand power to his vice president and would in turn receive immunity. Ahmar Sunday called on the international community to force Saleh to resign, reports AFP. "We are calling for an urgent intervention by the international community to bring an immediate stop to the massacres by this ignorant murderer," he said.

Separately, a US airstrike in Yemen Friday night killed nine people, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemeni member of Al Qaeda who was killed by an airstrike Sept. 30. The Associated Press reports that the dead were Al Qaeda militants, and included the media chief of Yemen’s Al Qaeda affiliate, Egyptian-born Ibrahim Al Banna.

Previous

1 | 2