YemenOnline-June15,2008- The boom of explosions swept across the high-walled compounds and minarets of this ancient Arab capital before dawn, as Shi'ite rebels battled for control of a mountain overlooking the city and its airport.

Government warplanes backed by artillery rebuffed the rebels, the latest skirmish in a largely hidden sectarian conflict that has drawn increasing attention from Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, Shi'ite Iran, and Sunni extremists eager for a fight.

"I believe this war is a proxy war," Yemeni lawmaker Ahmed Saif Hashed said in San'a, where civilians of the same Shi'ite sect as the rebels say they are facing increasing detentions, beatings, and surveillance.

The rebellion is being mounted by Yemen's Hashemite Shi'ites, who ruled the country for more than a 1,000 years until an alliance of Shi'ite and Sunni military officers deposed them in 1962. Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, belongs to the country's larger Shi'ite community, known as the Zaidis.

Giving the conflict a sectarian cast, his forces have been joined by Sunni tribesmen and extremists in battling the Hashemite rebels, who the government says are supported by Iran. The rebels say they want only their share of development, resources, and power.

"I think there is kind of a settling of accounts here against Iran," Hashed said.

Last week, 22 clerics in Saudi Arabia published a statement equating the Hashemite rebels to the Shi'ite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon. "If they have a country, they humiliate and exert control in their rule over Sunnis," the clerics said, citing Iran and Iraq. "They sow strife, corruption, and destruction among Muslims and destabilize security in Muslim countries . . . such as Yemen."

Last year, Yemen's defense minister published what was widely interpreted as a fatwa, or binding religious decree, sanctioning Sunnis to use force against the northern Shi'ite rebels. The largely impoverished nation of 23 million is majority Sunni.

"At first, yes, maybe the people looked to us as their natural leaders," said al-Mourtada al-Muhatwari, a Hashemite scholar in the capital who demonstrated how followers used to kneel before his father. "Now, we are trying only to survive."

In 2005, believing it had ended the rebellion, Yemen's government announced that 2,000 soldiers, rebels, and civilians had been killed in fighting. Despite several eruptions of violence since, the government has released no new casualty totals.

The government has made it difficult for independent observers to make assessments of the strife or aid victims.

Authorities have cut off most cellphone networks that reach the north. Government checkpoints and rebel ambushes have blocked the road to the north for most of the past month. Aid shipments to the estimated 100,000 people displaced - at least one in every seven people in the thinly populated mountains - have been interrupted since fighting resumed in early May.

The government has denied foreign journalists access to the north since the war began and last month also barred local journalists. Authorities called in Yemeni correspondents for foreign news organizations, telling them there was no need for the world to know of Yemen's problems in the northern city of Sa'ada, local journalists said.

Prosecutors brought sedition charges, with execution as possible punishment, against an editor who published photographs of devastated northern villages.

Major international rights groups largely bypass Yemen, leaving allegations that government tanks, warplanes, and artillery routinely bombard northern Shi'ite villages unexamined.

A son in a leading Hashemite family launched what became the rebellion in 2004. Hussein Badr al-Deen al-Houthi, head of a Shi'ite religious movement known as the Believing Youth, adopted a slogan sure to attract support from Yemen's public and irritate Saleh's US-backed government: "God is Great. Death to America. Death to Israel. Cursed be the Jews. Victory is Islam's."

Government officials sent troops and tribal fighters to crush the upstart.

Eighty-two days of fighting later, Houthi emerged from a cave where government-allied forces had cornered him with family and followers. Accounts of his subsequent death vary widely. His family says a government officer shot him to death after he came forward under a truce to negotiate.

"There's no confidence now," said Abdul Rahim Kassim al-Humrad, Houthi's brother-in-law. "As long as we're going to be killed, we might as well be killed in the mountains."

By Ellen Knickmeyer

Washington Post / June 15, 2008