Twenty one al Qaeda members and nine Yemeni soldiers were killed in fighting on Saturday in a province where the main city was seized by militants during the chaos of the country's bloody political crisis. Thousands of people have already fled the clashes between the army and al Qaeda in the southern province of Abyan, whose capital Zinjibar fell to the militants last month.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh's opponents have accused him of handing over Zinjibar to Islamists to reinforce his threat that the end of his three-decade rule, as demanded by protesters, would amount to ceding the region to al Qaeda.
The leader has not appeared in public since an attack on his palace eight days ago which left him with injuries that forced him to undergo surgery in Saudi Arabia, although Yemen's ambassador to Britain said on Saturday he was recovering and in a "stable condition".
"He's in his wing in the hospital, no longer in intensive care. He's conscious and talking," Ambassador Abdulla Ali al-Radhi told Reuters. Saudi medical sources and Yemeni officials said the Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Megawar and another cabinet member injured in the attack had been taken for more surgery, and described their condition as "serious".
Saleh has withstood nearly six months of protests and multiple diplomatic attempts to ease him out - all but paralysing Yemen and threatening even greater violence. Oil giant Saudi Arabia and Western countries fear protracted chaos could give al Qaeda a foothold in the impoverished Arabian peninsula state, which straddles oil export routes and has been a cornerstone of US counterterrorism strategy. His loyalists pledge Saleh, in his fourth decade of rule and a pillar of US counterterrorism strategy, will return in days. His opponents demand he formally hand over power immediately.
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