45,000 displaced by battles around Yemen's Mokha: UN

Fighting around Yemen's port of Mokha has forced some 45,000 people from their homes, a UN official said today, with many facing continued uncertainty and the threat of further displacement.

Shabia Mantoo, the Yemen spokeswoman for refugee agency UNHCR, told AFP that data compiled by her the agency and the UN Migration Agency (IOM) showed 45,000 people had been displaced in the last few weeks from Mokha and the nearby town of Dhubab.

Fighting has intensified in recent weeks in the southwest of Yemen, where forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi are battling to retake large parts of the country seized by Shiite Huthi rebels.
 

Loyalist troops took Mokha on February 10 and announced they aimed to push north and take the country's main Red Sea port of Hodeida next.

Mantoo said many of those fleeing the fighting around Mokha made their way north to Ibb district and to Hodeida province.

"Eight thousand people have been displaced from Mokha and Dhubab to Hodeida alone, many of them with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs," Mantoo said.

Two major concerns now are how to maintain access to the area and where the displaced will go if the fighting reaches Hodeida.

"The whole country is suffering from multiple displacement," Mantoo said. "People move from one place to another, because eventually it gets just as bad."

The UN estimates three million people have been displaced across Yemen.

The Huthi rebels launched a deadly counter-offensive after losing control of Mokha last month but were overpowered as government troops consolidated their grip on the area, inching a few kilometres (miles) north and east.

The Iran-backed Huthis, allied with forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, continue to control most of Yemen's 450 kilometre Red Sea coast, the capital Sanaa and much of the northern highlands.

The new figure on internally displaced persons marks a sharp rise from UNHCR data released on February 10, which reported 34,000 people displaced in the fighting since January around Mokha and Dhubab, located in the southwestern Taiz governorate.