RIYADH/ADEN, Yemen: A key member of a Saudi-led Arab coalition has blamed Islamists for delays in its military operations to expel Houthi rebels from the key southwestern province of Taiz.

The coalition Monday intensified airstrikes against the Iran-backed rebels in Taiz as an Emirati minister blamed an influential Sunni Islamist party’s for the delays.

Coalition jets carried out several strikes against rebels on the outskirts of Rahida, the province’s second-largest city, military sources said.

On the ground, loyalist troops and allied Popular Resistance fighters fired Katyusha rockets and mortar rounds at rebel positions, said Fadhl Hasan, commander of the operations to retake Rahida.

Breaking the siege of the government-held provincial capital of the same name is seen as crucial for the recapture of other central provinces and for opening the way to the rebel-controlled capital Sanaa.

Pro-government forces have retaken “19 military positions” from the rebels in areas surrounding Rahida since the offensive began a week ago, Hasan said.

Military officials have said land mines were hampering the progress of government forces and had caused casualties. Hasan said one of his troops was killed when a land mine exploded Monday.

The advance has also been slowed down by the “betrayal of some Popular Resistance fighters,” another military source said.

Emirati State Minister for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash tweeted Sunday that “had it not been for the failure of Al-Islah and the Muslim Brotherhood to act,” Taiz would already have been “liberated.”

The Islamist party Al-Islah is a main component of the Popular Resistance which also groups tribesmen, soldiers and southern separatists. The party, highly influential in Taiz, is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE has banned as a “terror” group.

The United Nations says more than 5,700 people have been killed since the Arab-led intervention in support of the Yemeni government was launched in March, nearly half of them civilians.

The coalition’s combat planning chief Saturday defended the air war in Yemen against widespread international concern about high numbers of civilian casualties.

The Royal Saudi Air Force brigadier general – who cannot be identified under the military’s security restrictions – accused rights groups and other critics of “looking through one eye only.”

“They are receiving all the information from the adversary,” he said of the Houthi rebels supported by forces loyal to ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“We are sticking to the rules, the international rules and Geneva Convention, first, and law of conflict,” the brigadier said in an interview with AFP.

“Most of the victims of the Houthi shelling and Saudi strikes are actually civilians,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center.

In late September and early October, the coalition twice denied it had bombed weddings in Yemen after dozens of civilians were killed.