The violence here has transformed a largely peaceful uprising into a tribal conflict with no clear end in sight. The United States and Yemen’s Arab neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which have tried and failed to mediate a peaceful solution to the country’s political crisis, are reduced to sitting on the sidelines and pleading for restraint.
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 also raises fears that Islamic militants who use Yemen as a base will have even freer rein to operate in the country.
The rising chaos has become a major concern for the White House, which announced Wednesday that John O. 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.”
On Wednesday afternoon, tanks and armored vehicles could be seen rolling into Sana, the capital, from the south. The streets of Sana were largely empty, as residents fled for the safety of surrounding villages. Exploding artillery shells and sporadic machine-gun fire could be heard across the city.
Despite his repeated public offers to step aside to ease the crisis in the country, Yemen’s authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to be gearing up for a major assault on the Ahmar family, the tribal rivals and political opposition leaders he has been battling for 10 days.
“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 Sana since the civil war of the 1960s.” 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 on Tuesday, with each side blaming the other.
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 Sana. The city of Taiz, south of the capital, remained in a state of lockdown, days after government forces and plainclothes gunmen opened fire on a vast crowd of peaceful protesters who had been holding a sit-in for months. Dozens of people were killed, according to witnesses and human rights groups, and the episode provoked condemnations from the United States and other countries.
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 Sana and in cities across Yemen have held fast to their belief in nonviolent resistance, but some have begun to call for war against Mr. 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 forces arrayed against the government have diverse and sometimes conflicting agendas, but the rising chaos appears to have emboldened them all, including the Yemen-based group that calls itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has become a major concern for the United States.
Nasser Arrabyee reported from Sana, and Robert F. Worth from Washington. J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York, Laura Kasinof from Washington and Khaled Hammadi from Sana.