SANAA, Yemen — A pair of car bombs in central Yemen on Tuesday killed at least 25 people, nearly two-thirds of them schoolgirls whose bus was hit, Yemeni officials said.
A Shiite Muslim rebel group blamed al-Qaida for causing the girls’ deaths in a botched attack on a Shiite official under the rebels’ protection.
Impoverished but strategic Yemen, long beset by pervasive tribal and sectarian violence that a weak central government has been unable to rein in, entered a phase of even more serious instability after Shiite Houthi rebels overran the capital, Sanaa, in September and seized swaths of territory in other parts of the country.
The Houthis, aligned with Shiite Muslim Iran, have been locked in combat with the Yemen affiliate of al-Qaida, which has been a target of repeated U.S. drone strikes. On Dec. 6, al-Qaida captors executed an American hostage, journalist Luke Somers, together with a South African national being held with him as American special forces backed by Yemeni troops attempted a rescue raid, the Pentagon said.
In Sana, Houthis were reportedly massing Tuesday near the Defense Ministry, with tensions running high in the wake of an incendiary speech a day earlier by a Houthi leader. Over the weekend, the Houthis claimed to have gained control of Arhab, an outlying district of Sanaa, cementing their grip on the capital.
At least one of the bombs that went off Tuesday in Bayda province, south of Sanaa, was believed to have targeted a checkpoint outside the home of a Shiite official, Abdullah Idris. But one of the explosions hit a passing bus carrying female elementary school students, killing at least 15 of them, according to an unidentified military official quoted on a website associated with the Defense Ministry.
The 10 other dead in Tuesday’s blasts in the city of Radaa included Houthi rebels and civilians, officials and witnesses said, but the breakdown was not immediately clear. The area, long an al-Qaida stronghold, has been a flashpoint for recent fighting between al-Qaida and Houthi forces.
The growing turmoil in Yemen, which is situated alongside key oil-shipping routes, has alarmed neighboring Saudi Arabia, the main regional Sunni Muslim power, which accuses Iran of fomenting violence in Yemen and elsewhere.
The confrontation echoes sectarian tensions being played out across in the region, most notably in Syria’s savage civil war and in Iraqi government forces’ summertime retreat in the face of an offensive by the Sunni militants of the Islamic State.
A U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes is now underway to try to reverse gains by the Islamic State, which still maintains control of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and major towns in Syria.
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