Cairo, Sep 14: Yemen’s Houthi rebels captured more strategic islands in the southern Red Sea, Yemeni government and Houthi officials said on Monday, strengthening their control of a major maritime shipping route.

The rebels deployed fighters on the islands of Greater Hanish and Lesser Hanish 160 kilometres north of Bab el-Mandeb Strait, according to two government officials and a Houthi official.

The Houthis took over the islands after hundreds of government-allied forces withdrew from the archipelago, said the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to journalists.

The capture of the islands came after the rebels last week seized the port city of Mokha and the island of Mayun, located inside Bab el-Mandeb Strait from Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces. (AP)

Aden, Sep 14: The conflict in Yemen intensified on Sunday, as government forces launched attacks against Iran-backed Houthi rebels along the Red Sea and Houthis fired into neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which supports Yemen’s government.

The Yemeni government vowed to send more forces to the Red Sea coast and one official conceded a “painful” defeat last week when Houthis captured the port city of Mokha and an island on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial shipping alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

The escalation — especially Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and its shipping in the Red Sea — adds pressure on global oil supplies and prices, and that could give Iran leverage in its war with the United States.

As Yemen risks descending into another civil war, the United Nations estimated that more than 80,000 people in the impoverished country have been displaced by the fighting since the start of September.

One woman said a mortar shell fell nearby as she fled in the middle of the night from the town of Khawkha in Hodeida province along the Red Sea, shortly before it was captured by Houthis.

“I saw with my own eyes cars and buses burning, and bodies of children and women were lying on the road in a horrific scene,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for her and her family’s safety.

Houthis claim attacks against Saudi Arabia

Saudi authorities sounded sirens Sunday afternoon in the southern city of Abha and Khamis Mushait province, warning residents to take shelter from potential incoming fire. Both areas were repeatedly attacked by the Houthi in recent weeks.

The Houthis claimed to have used drones and missiles to target Saudi Arabia, including a military base just over the border with Yemen. Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree didn’t provide evidence or say when the attack occurred.

The Saudi civil defence overnight said a projectile fell in a different area near the border with Yemen along the Red Sea, injuring two people and damaging a mosque and several other buildings. The statement blamed the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia did not announce any new attacks targeting the Houthis.

The Houthis are targeting Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping as part of a recently declared blockade, but they have said they do not intend to threaten other countries’ commercial shipping.

Yemen says 500 soldiers killed as it vows to fight back

The National Resistance, a government-allied force that had controlled coastal areas, said more than 500 government fighters were killed on the west coast over the past four weeks — its first comprehensive toll.

It also said more than 1,000 Houthis had been killed in Hodeida and Taiz provinces. A spokesman for the Houthis didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Yemen is home to over 40 million people who fear a return to the civil war that began more than a decade ago and killed 150,000, bringing many others to the brink of famine. Yemen’s internationally recognised government and Saudi Arabia have been battling the Houthis for 12 years. A ceasefire that began in 2022 had mostly halted the fighting.

A senior government official in Yemen said its forces will return to the Red Sea coast and fight back. People fleeing the Houthi advance told The Associated Press they saw forces withdrawing and urging people to run.

Sultan al-Arada, a member of the ruling presidential leadership council, described the collapse of government forces in the port city of Mokha and elsewhere on Yemen’s west coast as “painful and regrettable.” He said in the televised interview aired late Saturday that forces “are currently regrouping and will return to the battle.”

On Sunday, Rashad al-Alimi, who leads the presidential council, sought to downplay the defeats as “incidental,” according to comments published by the country’s state-run SABA news agency. The government, he said, “will remain clear and fixed on the goal of retrieving (state) institutions and of reclaiming sovereignty over all national territories.”

On Sunday, the Yemeni military said it launched airstrikes on Houthi positions in Mokha, the coastal town of Dhubab and elsewhere in Taiz province. The rebels reported strikes by the Saudi-backed forces in Taiz province and artillery shelling in Saada province, a Houthi stronghold on Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia.

The advance puts Houthis closer to a major US base in Djibouti

The Houthis’ advance puts them just 32 kilometres from the US military base in Djibouti, on the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. It’s the main US base in Africa and one of several foreign military bases in Djibouti, including those of China, France and Japan.

The small Horn of Africa nation is already seeing the arrival of displaced Yemenis making the perilous water crossing. More than 2,000 Yemenis have reached Djibouti, the International Organisation for Migration said Sunday.

Djibouti’s Economy and Finance Minister Ilyas M Dawaleh, said on X that the country’s navy, coast guard and other specialized agencies were conducting rescue operations and providing emergency assistance.

Yemenis displaced by fighting worry about their survival

The UN migration agency said Sunday that more than 82,000 people in Yemen have been displaced since the beginning of September.

“The displaced people are in a very bad condition,” said Ahmad al-Masawi, the director of the Al Salam camp in the southern port city of Aden, who appealed to international organisations for assistance. “They left their homes quickly without any clothing or anything. They are crammed in camps, houses and even on roads.”

Hussein Haydara sat outside a shelter at the camp in a white undershirt, as his children waited to be assigned to a tent. He worried about how far the shelter is from schools, hospitals and markets, and wondered how they will survive the next weeks or months.

Haydara had fled his home in Hodeida once before, when the Houthis took it over in 2015. But this time feels more precarious.

“With the first displacement, we had time to plan things but this time we were forced to escape all of a sudden. One could hardly take their children and the lightest stuff possible,” he said.

Dublin, Sep 14: President Donald Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.

While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.

“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that … shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”

The Republican president spoke a day after Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly agreed with Amodei.

Asked by a reporter if the industry should slow down or be regulated, Trump said after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg that the United States is leading China in the development of AI and “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House later in September to meet with Trump, and AI likely will be among the items they discuss.

AI has become a major election-year issue in the US as some of the country’s largest companies seed small towns with a national network of computing warehouses while Americans from both parties increasingly raise alarms about less farmland and water supplies and rising electricity bills. Trump has kept up his support for data centres even as both Republicans and Democrats run from them and many communities try to block them.

Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, said his party should make AI a campaign issue.

“I would talk about this, and I would say, here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this. … I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement. Where is that going to hit? How are we going to respond?” he said at an event last week with the top Democrat in the US House, New York Rep Hakeem Jeffries, according to a transcript released by his office.

White House meetings and a call for action by members of Congress

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council at the White House, said he expects meetings will be held this week involving administration officials who oversee cyber and science and technology policy to discuss the next steps. Trump also could meet with members of Congress, some of whom have also been sounding alarms about the fast pace of AI development.

“I think the president wants to hear from them as well,” Hassett said.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged the need for “some guardrails, some safety measures” so AI “doesn’t run away.” But, like Trump, he also wants to ensure the US does not “lose our edge in the global competition on this with China because that would be a national security threat.”

Jeffries criticised Republican leaders for allowing members to go back to their districts for the final part of September.

“We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, … the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely,” Jeffries said.

Industry insider urges cooperation between Washington, Beijing

Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who resigned over AI concerns and has gone public with his fears, argued for international rules along with industry self-regulation.

Coxon said he has grown concerned that AI models would soon gain super capabilities that could exceed human control.

“You’re building a human-level or superhuman-level mind, without understanding what it wants, or thinks, or the way it thinks,” Coxon said.

At a time of a fierce global competition for AI dominance, Coxon also urged cooperation between the US and China, the two countries who are leading the race, to slow down and address safety.

“I do hope that the people in China who are looking at the same problems as we are, so they’re trying to build the same technology, will come to the same conclusion that it has to be done in a measured manner, and it should be easy to cooperate on some sort of mutual — of mutual slowing,” Coxon said.

Otherwise, he said, “we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous.”