SANA, Yemen — Islamist militants battled Yemeni security forces in the southern province of Abyan on Sunday even as the government struck a deal for a cease-fire in the capital, Sana, with its tribal rivals, bringing relative calm here after days of fierce fighting.
In Sana, Yemeni officials said President Ali Abdullah had agreed to a truce with his historic tribal rivals the Ahmar family. Violence broke out between the two sides last Monday after Mr. Saleh refused to follow through on his promise to sign an agreement leading to his resignation.
“There is a truce and it is still holding,” said Abdul Karim Aleryani, prominent governing party official and adviser to Mr. Saleh. However other officials described the truce as tenuous and far from set in stone.
Still, after more than 100 people were killed last week in fighting that provoked fears of civil war, there were tangible signs of a reduction in tensions. Tribesmen from the Hashid tribal confederation loyal to the Ahmar family began Sunday to hand over to authorities government buildings that they had occupied last week.
“We will hand over the other ministries one by one gradually,” said Hashem al-Ahmar, one of the 10 Ahmar brothers, told reporters on Sunday.
However, a spokesperson for Sheik Sadiq al-Ahmar, Abdulqawi Qaisi, told local reporters that the Ahmars will fully comply with a cease-fire only if the government removes its security forces from their posts in houses near the Ahmar compound in the Hasaba district in northern Sana.
Even if the cease-fire holds, the crisis in Yemen is far from resolved. Peaceful protests calling for Mr. Saleh’s ouster have drawn hundreds of thousands of people on the streets for months. Three times Mr. Saleh has agreed to sign an agreement setting up a transfer of power and three times he has renegged.
In Taiz, a central city and home of the country’s largest demonstration, security forces fired at protesters from a government building on Sunday, killing four, according to local doctor, Abdul Rahim al-Samie. He said he still heard gunshots coming from the building until the evening.
In Abyan, a volatile province in southern Yemen, Yemeni security forces started shelling the coastal city of Zinjibar after several hundred militants took over government institutions there on Friday, residents said. A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that five soldiers had been killed in the fighting there since Friday.
The militants took over banks, government offices and security headquarters, the residents said. They also said that the militants had been driving around the city in cars with loudspeakers blaring, “We declare that Zinjibar fell in the hands of Mujahideen after it was liberated from the agents of the Americans.”
It was unclear whether the militants, who traveled from Jaar to Zinjibar, belong to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the international terrorist network, however the area is filled with citizens who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
The terrorist organization has used the lack of rule of law in Abyan to raise its profile, and the fighting in Zinjibar was another example militants in outlying provinces exploiting the chaos in Yemen to advance their causes. Militants took over the nearby city of Jaar in March and in the north Houthi rebels established themselves as the rulers of Saada Province the same month after government officials fled the area.
However protesters and members of Yemen’s opposition blame the fighting in Zinjibar on Mr. Saleh, who they believe is orchestrating the chaos so that he will not have to leave office.
“Saleh instructed to handover Zinjibar to armed groups working for him to frighten others that if he is gone Yemen will become Somalia,” said former minister of defense Abdullah Ali Eliwa, in a televised press statement.
He was speaking on behalf of military leaders who support the protest movement. “Saleh is trying to wrongly portray the army as a failed institution,” he said.