A top-ranking Yemeni official says U.S. and British military trainers have arrived at a port in the country’s southeastern province of al-Mahrah bordering Saudi Arabia and Oman on vessels loaded with munitions as well as military and logistical equipment.

Sanaa, June 30 (RHC)-- A top-ranking Yemeni official says U.S. and British military trainers have arrived at a port in the country’s southeastern province of al-Mahrah bordering Saudi Arabia and Oman on vessels loaded with munitions as well as military and logistical equipment.

The provincial governor, al-Qatabi Ali Hussein al-Faraj, told Yemen’s official Saba news agency on Wednesday that large arms shipments aboard military vessels disembarked at the port of Nishtun, and that British and American military trainers are stationed at al-Ghaydah International Airport.

“The Saudi-led coalition of aggression is involved in the smuggling and trade of narcotics in the area in order to perpetuate insecurity, advance its fiendish plots and deter the local population from confronting the invaders,” Faraj said.

The senior Yemeni official noted that occupiers and their allied Takfiri militants are trying to plunge Mahrah province into utter chaos and confusion as locals are fiercely opposed to the presence of foreign forces.  Faraj stressed that the boiling public rage over the deployment of foreign troops to Mahrah indicates that the battle to liberate the province from the clutches of invaders and their mercenaries is reaching its final stages.

Last month, the leader of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement said the United States, with the help of its allied Takfiri militant groups, was building several military bases in the country’s eastern provinces of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah as well as on the Red Sea coast.

Addressing a delegation of tribal leaders from the western Yemeni province of Ibb on May 19, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said Washington was setting up military installations in eastern Yemen and the country's southern coastal city of Aden.

He asserted that the Yemeni nation cannot accept Washington’s diktats, warning that the enemies are hell-bent on sowing the seeds of discord and division among people by hook or by crook.  “We must work for security and social stability in Ibb province through compromise and cooperation among local authorities,” the top Yemeni resistance leader told the delegation.

He said the “enemies” have begun to mobilize military reinforcements by taking advantage of the UN-brokered ceasefire, which clearly shows their orientation towards the next stage of the war, and bears testimony to their failure in the previous phase. 

In a separate development, at least five guards and two pedestrians were killed when a car bomb targeted a motorcade of a high-ranking security official in Yemen's southern port city of Aden on Wednesday afternoon.

A local source was quoted as saying in media that the blast struck the convoy of General Saleh Al-Sayd, commander of security forces in the neighboring southern province of Lahj, when his motorcade was passing through a main street near Aden airport.  The source said that the explosion destroyed an armored vehicle of the official's convoy.