SANAA, Yemen – Three Al-Jazeera journalists who were abducted in the war-ravaged Yemeni city of Taiz have been released, the network said in a statement on Thursday as one of the released reporters accused Shiite rebels of being behind the kidnapping.<\/p>\n
The network said that reporter Hamdi al-Bokari and crew members Abdulaziz al-Sabri and Moneer al-Sabai were freed. Al-Bokari wrote on his Facebook page that he was abducted by Houthis and that they were subjected to “terrible mental torture” without elaboration.<\/p>\n
Yemen’s civil war began when Shiite rebels known as Houthis took control of the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. In March, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia began airstrikes and later, a ground operation to retake the country from the Houthis, who are allied with forces loyal to Yemen’s former president and have received support from Iran.<\/p>\n
Journalists have been frequently targeted in Yemen’s conflict. A day before the disappearance of the Al-Jazeera journalists, a 35-year-old reporter Almigdad Mohammed Ali Mojalli, who contributed to the Voice of America, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper and the Nairobi-based Integrated Regional Information Networks, was killed in an apparent Saudi-led airstrike outside of Sanaa.<\/p>\n
The province of Taiz sits in the country’s rugged interior mountains and its nearly three million residents have been caught in fighting between Houthis besieging the city and pro-government fighters backed by heavy airstrikes from the Saudi-led military coalition.<\/p>\n
For months, residents and aid groups say the Houthis have been indiscriminately shelling Taiz and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid there. While al-Bokari blames Houthis, Taiz’s local militias include militants from al-Qaida’s offshoot in Yemen in addition to hardline Salafi Muslims whom some activists blamed for the abduction in recent days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SANAA, Yemen – Three Al-Jazeera journalists who were abducted in the war-ravaged Yemeni city of Taiz have been released, the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":66051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[9230],"class_list":["post-69672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","tag-uploads","mauthors-ahmed-al-haj","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}