Clashes kill Saudi soldier and 10 wounded on Yemeni border

A Saudi soldier has been shot dead and 10 others wounded in exchange of gunfire across the Yemeni border, Saudi sources say.

According to Saudi Interior Ministry’s statement on Thursday, the Border Guards at a post in the kingdom’s southwestern Asir region came “under fire from a mountainous interior zone,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

The incident came more than a week after Saudi Arabia started its aggression through airstrikes against its southern neighbor, with the dead and injured soldiers being its first casualties since Riyadh started its war against Houthi movement’s Ansarullah revolutionaries.

Saudi Arabia’s air campaign in Yemen started on March 26 in a bid to restore power to fugitive former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

Nearly 200 people have lost their lives in Yemen since Saudi-led airstrikes began on March 26. Many of the casualties are civilians, among them women and children.

Hadi stepped down in January and refused to reconsider the decision despite calls by the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

However, the Ansarullah movement later said Hadi had lost his legitimacy as president of Yemen after he escaped Sana’a to Aden in February.

On March 25, the embattled president fled the southern city of Aden, where he had sought to set up a rival power base, to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, after Ansarullah revolutionaries advanced on Aden.

The Ansarullah fighters took control of the Yemeni capital in September 2014 and are currently moving southward. The revolutionaries said the Hadi government was incapable of properly running the affairs of the country and containing the growing wave of corruption and terror.