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War in Yemen Is Allowing Qaeda Group to Expand

People salvaged items from a government bank that was hit by an airstrike Thursday in the northern Yemeni province of Saada.Credit...Reuters

Saeed Al-Batati and

DOWAAN, Yemen — Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen took control of a major airport and an oil export terminal in the southern part of the country on Thursday, expanding the resurgent militant group’s reach just two weeks after it seized the nearby city of Al Mukalla and emptied its bank and prison.

Local officials said that fighters belonging to the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, also known as AQAP, took control of the Riyan Airport and a nearby military base outside Al Mukalla, the fifth-largest city in Yemen. The group also seized the Dhabah oil terminal on the Arabian Sea coast, which the group had tried to capture before, according to Yemeni officials.

Al Qaeda is capitalizing on the expanding multisided war in Yemen and the collapse of its government to carve out territory for itself. When its fighters stormed Al Mukalla, the capital of Hadhramaut Province, they seized government buildings, looted the central bank office and freed hundreds of inmates from the city penitentiary, including a senior leader of the group.

Al Qaeda’s adversaries in Yemen are largely in disarray or distracted by other fighting. Military units have melted away or put up little resistance as Al Qaeda has advanced. The Houthis, a militia movement from northern Yemen that is considered Al Qaeda’s most determined foe, have been preoccupied with battles against rival militias across the country, and their fighters have been battered by aerial assaults from the Saudi-led Arab coalition, which is trying to restore the exiled government to power.

Saudi Arabia has focused on crippling the Houthis, leaving Al Qaeda all but unopposed around Al Mukalla, though the group was dealt a setback this week when a top figure and several other members were killed in an American drone strike.

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Khaled Bahah, the former prime minister of Yemen and its recently appointed vice president, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday.Credit...Ahmed Farwan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Still, the Saudi assaults on the Houthis have indirectly helped empower Al Qaeda in ways the group had not enjoyed before. Its fighters are now developing relations with Yemeni tribal leaders who share antipathy for the Houthis and their allies, said Jamal Benomar, the United Nations diplomat who had unsuccessfully sought to achieve a political reconciliation in Yemen.

“For the first time, Al Qaeda is building a strategic alliance with the tribes,” Mr. Benomar, who has requested a reassignment, said in an interview at The New York Times on Wednesday. “It is a strengthened and dangerous Al Qaeda. This is what worries everybody.”

In Washington, Pentagon officials acknowledged that the American-backed Saudi airstrikes have created more space for Al Qaeda to gain territory. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, in a news conference, called gains by the group “of serious concern” to the United States. “It’s obvious that it’s easier to do our counterterror operations when there’s a settled government” in Yemen, he said. “In the meantime, we need to, and do, protect ourselves against AQAP. Because they are dangerous.”

Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of the United States Central Command, was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday for meetings with Saudi officials. Mr. Carter said that the United States would continue to support the Saudi campaign, calling the kingdom “a longstanding friend and ally,” and that the United States was trying to “help them protect themselves and their own border.” Mr. Carter characterized the Saudi objective in Yemen as restoring “a political process there in which a legitimate government can be established.”

With growing alarm over the extremists’ gains and the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation, Khaled Bahah, a top official in the exiled government, called on Thursday for the Houthis to halt their offensive as a condition for peace talks.

Speaking in Saudi Arabia, where the government has taken refuge, Mr. Bahah said the “language of reason and dialogue must be given priority.” But first, he said, the Houthis must halt their attacks and “stop tampering with the destiny of the nation and destroying its institutions.”

Mr. Bahah was appointed vice president on Sunday by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who fled Yemen shortly before the Saudis began bombing.

Mr. Bahah, who served as Yemen’s last prime minister, is widely viewed as a conciliatory figure among the country’s increasingly fractured and polarized political elite. His appointment as vice president was seen as an attempt to bridge the divisions fueling the war and to provide alternative leadership to that of Mr. Hadi, who lacks any significant base of support.

But a senior Houthi official, responding to Mr. Bahah’s comments on Thursday, told Reuters that the Saudi-led bombing campaign had to stop “immediately and without conditions.”

The political deadlock has contributed to increasingly dire assessments from international aid agencies about the toll on civilians in Yemen, a country that must import nearly all of its food. The Saudi-led military coalition has imposed an air and sea blockade, which, along with the fighting, has caused critical shortages of food and fuel in many cities, including Sana, the capital, and Aden, a southern port gripped by combat for weeks.

The World Food Program said Thursday that it would distribute food to 105,000 displaced people around Aden in the next few days, but that conditions were so unsafe it was “struggling to reach people.” The World Health Organization said on Thursday that it had delivered more than 18 tons of medicine and surgical supplies to Sana.

According to the United Nations, hundreds of people have been killed in the fighting, including at least 364 civilians. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch called for an investigation into airstrikes last month that it said had killed at least 31 civilian workers at a dairy factory outside the port city of Hodeida.

Also on Thursday, Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity, said that physicians at a hospital it helps administer had treated 30 civilians wounded in airstrikes overnight in northern Amran Province.

Saeed al-Batati reported from Dowaan, and Kareem Fahim from Cairo. Merna Thomas contributed reporting from Cairo, Rick Gladstone from New York, and Helene Cooper from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: War in Yemen Is Allowing Qaeda Group to Expand. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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