Yemen's rebels Thursday withdrew from their stronghold of Saada city, two weeks into a ceasefire to end an insurgency that has also drawn in Saudi Arabia, a source in the truce committee said. “Under an agreement reached between the committee supervising the ceasefire and representatives of the Houthi rebels, the fighters who were holed up in the old quarter have been allowed to leave,” the source told Reuters. The rebels left the city, some 240 km north of the capital Sana'a. Meanwhile, members of a truce committee Thursday said that slow-going mine clearance operations were holding up the deployment of Yemeni troops along the Yemen-Saudi border, a key step demanded by both Sana'a and Riyadh. A member of the committee overseeing the truce said Yemeni troops had taken up some positions near the Saudi-Yemen border, but had not yet fully deployed because of land mines. The committee had earlier said that troops would start deploying on the Saudi border last weekend. Yemen's government struck a truce on Feb. 11 with the insurgents who have battled the government since 2004 in Yemen's mountainous north in a war that has displaced 250,000 people. Hostilities in north Yemen appear to have significantly eased since the truce came into effect, although some violence and truce violations have been reported. Meanwhile, an informed Yemeni source expressed the fears of a seventh war between the rebels and the Yemeni troops following an exchange of accusations between a parliamentarian and the dismissed governor of Saada province, Hasan Manna' over the overall situation of the province. City gets a face-lift Workers fix potholes, paint mosques and refurbish historic buildings in the sleepy city of Tarim in Yemen's vast Hadramaut region, where authorities are seeking to lure back tourists scared away by Al-Qaeda attacks. Tarim is getting a face-lift before it replaces Qayrawan in Tunisia next month as the “capital of Islamic culture”, an honor that rotates annually among cities in the Islamic world. Yemen hopes the title will help revive tourism, an economic mainstay which collapsed after an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber killed four South Korean tourists in another Hadramaut city a year ago. They had been visiting Shibam, a UNESCO World Heritage site dubbed the “Manhattan of the Desert” for its 16th century mud-brick tower houses rising up to 16 storeys high. “Terrorism has hit tourism seriously. We hope there will be a rise in the numbers of tourists in the future,” said Muadh Al- Shihabi, director of the Tarim cultural capital project.
