GCC shrugs off Houthi military drills

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has said its member states have “enough capability to protect (their) territories and sovereignty,” after thousands of Shiite Houthi rebels held military drills in northern Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia.
Qatari Foreign Minister Khaled Al-Attiyah, whose country currently holds of the rotating GCC chair, made the statements after a GCC meeting in Riyadh.
“A move here and there would not affect the GCC states,” Attiyah told a news conference.
Mohammed Abdulsalam, a spokesman for the militia, confirmed on Friday that the Houthis held military exercises near the Saudi border.
"Thousands of soldiers belonging to army units based in northern Yemen participated Thursday afternoon in these maneuvers, the first of this magnitude," Abdulsalam told AFP from Baghdad, which he is visiting.
Abdulsalam said heavy weapons including tanks and artillery, captured by the Houthis as they spread their control across parts of Yemen, were used in the drills that took place in Kitaf, a town in the Saada province.
Meanwhile, in a statement on Twitter, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on Friday claimed responsibility for an attack on a building used by Shiite militiamen as its headquarters in Rada, a town in central Yemen, saying its militants had killed "more than 20 Houthis".
Certain factions in the deeply divided Yemeni Army have allied themselves with the Houthis against President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
The president has tried to consolidate his control over Aden since he fled there.
Last week, he sacked the commander of the city's military garrison, a Special Forces contingent led by a general viewed as loyal to Hadi's predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who the UN says is ally of the Houthis.
General Abdel-Hafez Al-Saqqaf refused to step down, culminating in a gunfight on Thursday in which one soldier and two members of a local militia loyal to Hadi were killed, according to Aden residents.