Attendees at the ceremony to greet Yemen’s cabinet at Aden airport flee after a massive explosion at a nearby reception hall on December 30th, 2020 (Credit: Murad Saeed, via WashingtonPost.com)
At least one massive explosion at the airport in Yemen’s port city of Aden killed at least 26 people and injured 50 more on Wednesday. The blast occurred inside or near a reception hall, as a commercial airliner landed nearby with the nation’s new UN-recognized government aboard. What was meant to be a celebratory occasion, after a year of political deadlock between two of Yemen’s Sunni factions, ended with screams and sirens as hundreds of people gathered on the tarmac and inside the hall to welcome the prime minister and his new unity cabinet instead fled for their lives. At least one junior cabinet staffer and two members of the International Red Cross were among the dead, along with some unidentified local officials. A possible secondary explosion was reported at Maasheq Palace, where the cabinet was transported shortly after the airport blast.
No claim of responsibility was made for the attack, although the Saudi government, which acted as a mediator between Yemen’s government and the breakaway Southern Transitional Council (STC), claimed to have shot down a drone used by Houthi rebels near the presidential palace, leading both the STC and Yemeni Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed to claim that the Houthis were also behind the airport strike, calling it a “cowardly terrorist attack.” Saeed alleged that his new cabinet was the target of the attack, which had landed behind schedule and had therefore not reached the reception hall at the time of the blast. The Houthis practice a variant of Shi’a Islam and have acted as proxies of the radical Shiite government of Iran in Yemen’s civil war, which began when Houthi rebels swept across the northwestern territory of Yemen in late 2014, taking the capital of Sana’a. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Gulf Arab states have supported the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, sometimes intervening directly against the Houthis in deadly bombing campaigns. In return, the Houthis have repeatedly launched rockets across their border with Saudi Arabia, including munitions which they received from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The latest unity government seeks to heal the rift between Hadi’s government and separatist Sunni tribes in the south who declared independence from the government earlier this year, but who are also opposed to the Iran-backed Houthi Ansar Allah movement.
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After six years of civil war and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yemen’s already impoverished population faces an even more dire outlook in the coming years, as violence, famine and disease continue to accelerate the poor Arab nation into the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. The latest attack on Yemen’s unity government threatens the renewal of broader hostilities, not only on the Arabian Peninsula, but across the Middle East. We pray for the full recovery of all who were injured in the explosion, for the full truth of the matter and those responsible to be revealed, and for God to grant Arab leaders wisdom in their response. As always, we pray that ongoing upheaval and chaos in Yemen would open new fields of harvest for the Father’s laborers, and that he would send them soon.
Maranatha.
