Islamists Seize a Yemeni City, Stoking Fears

The fall of the coastal city of Zinjibar to self-styled holy warriors who claimed to have “liberated” it from “the agents of the Americans” fed into Western fears that militants sympathetic to Al Qaeda could exploit the breakdown of authority to take control of territory.

Political opponents of Yemen’s embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, portrayed the takeover as a ploy by Mr. Saleh to prove to wavering allies why they needed to keep him in power. While Mr. Saleh, who has faced months of massive street protests demanding his ouster, has frequently warned that militants would take over the country if he left, there was no evidence on Sunday that he had any role in allowing Zinjibar to fall.

The fighting in the south came after a week in which tribal fighting in the capital, Sana, pushed the country to the brink of civil war. That front seemed to quiet on Sunday as the government struck a cease-fire deal with its tribal rivals, bringing relative calm here after days of fierce fighting in which more than 100 people were killed.

Violence broke out between the two sides last Monday after Mr. Saleh refused to follow through on his promise to sign an agreement leading to his resignation. It was the third time since the uprising began in January that Mr. Saleh had agreed to transfer power, and the third time he reneged on the promise.

Officials described the truce as tenuous, and gun fire and shelling were heard in the capital late on Sunday night.

The protests that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in cities across Yemen continued, and at the largest one, in the central city of Taiz, security forces fired at protesters from a government building on Sunday, killing four, according to a local doctor, Abdul Rahim al-Samie. Early on Monday, protesters there said that plainclothes men were setting their tents on fire and destroying others with bulldozers. 

The United States has until recently backed Mr. Saleh as an ally in the fight against Al Qaeda, whose Yemeni branch is considered one of the most active terrorist threats against the United States and Europe. The militants who took over the town of Jaar in March and Zinjibar this weekend are not known to have ties to Al Qaeda, but the volatile province of Abyan, where both cities are located, is filled with citizens who are sympathetic to the group.

Residents said that despite the efforts of a handful of soldiers, who mounted a brief defense, the town fell quickly and easily to several hundred militants. Most of the military quickly abandoned the town on Friday, residents said, but it was impossible to determine whether they had been ordered to do so.

They also said that the militants had been driving around the city in cars with loudspeakers blaring, “We declare that Zinjibar fell in the hands of mujahedeen after it was liberated from the agents of the Americans.”

A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that five soldiers had been killed in the fighting there since Friday.

The former defense minister, Abdullah Ali Eliwa, accused Mr. Saleh of ordering his forces “to hand over Zinjibar” to the militants in order to “frighten people that if he goes, Yemen will become Somalia.”

He offered no proof of that claim, and by Sunday government forces were firing artillery at the militants, which experts said suggested they were either not complicit or that the demonstration had run its course.

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst at Princeton University, said that Mr. Saleh “has certainly exaggerated the Al Qaeda threat throughout the years,” finding that foreign aid increases when the threat appears to be higher.

Mr. Saleh warned in a speech a week ago that Abyan would fall to Al Qaeda if he were forced from office. And when militants took over Jaar, Mr. Saleh in several speeches claimed that Al Qaeda was running the entire province of Abyan, a stark exaggeration.