Image source: Al Jazeera

BY MONICA AYALA-TALAVERA

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The death toll in Yemen has now reached 60. Gunfire and shelling rocked the country for the third straight day. Al Jazeera reports:

“Witnesses say heavy weaponry like machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades were used. ‘We started out with a message of peace but we were attacked with gun fire and even RPGs.’”

Hundred are wounded in the protest against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. And hospital workers are asking for help. The Telegraph talked to the head of a field hospital in Sanaa who had this to say:

“We call on all the relevant parties, the (aid) organizations, the UN, the EU, all the embassies working in our dear country to carry out their humanitarian role and intervene.”

President Saleh left Yemen to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia last June. Protestors are calling his four-month leave unconstitutional since Yemeni law calls for elections if the president is absent for three months. PBS Newshour reports since the president left, it is unclear who exactly is running the country.

“The vice president has not been exercising the control that many would like to have seen him exercising.”
“So, who is running Yemen?”
“It’s the president's family who is still running Yemen. The remnants of the regime are still within the military and the security services. And those are the ones who are doing this. Now, there's no incentive to compromise right now. That's the scary thing.”

CNN reports the opposition does not have any desire to compromise either. Talks for the Gulf Cooperation Council, a plan that would require President Saleh to step down and hand over power to a transitional government, are not dead – but they may be futile.

“They’re not going to be satisfied by this one piece of paper finally being signed. There’s a lot of distrust of the government, and all the activists that I speak with reiterate this, they say even if this GCC deal is signed, it doesn’t matter – they want leadership gone, they want new leadership, they want a new Yemen.”

Fears of a civil war in Yemen run high, but the US and Saudia Arabia are more concerned about who would come to power if war did break out. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

“Both states point to an al-Qaeda insurgency inside Yemen that could gain a greater foothold in the event of a power vacuum.”

Whether international intervention will occur is still unclear.