SANA, Yemen — Suicide bombings at a mosque killed at least 25 people Thursday during prayers to commemorate the beginning of Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday, Interior Ministry officials said.
Tamim al-Shami, a spokesman for Yemen’s Health Ministry, said the mosque, in Sana’s Al Bilili neighborhood, was attacked by two bombers — one who hid explosives inside a shoe and detonated them as he entered the mosque, and another who attacked worshipers as they fled that initial blast.
A Yemeni-based affiliate of the Islamic State released a statement afterward saying that one of its members had carried out the bombing. The group has claimed responsibility for a string of recent similar attacks on mosques in Sana, including one this month that killed more than 30 people.
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The bombings by the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group, have often been seen as efforts to incite a broader sectarian conflict with followers of the Houthis, the Shi’ite-led rebel movement that has controlled Sana for more than a year. Some of the mosques the group has attacked, including the one on Thursday, were frequented by Houthi supporters, though Yemen’s mosques are generally not segregated by sect.
The frequency of the attacks has also raised questions about how securely the Houthis control the capital, six months after a Saudi-led military coalition began an offensive to drive them from Sana and other cities. Coalition warplanes have been battering Sana with airstrikes for weeks now, in what could be preparation for a ground invasion of the city by allied forces in a province east of the capital.
The war started in March after the Houthis drove Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, into exile in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, along with other Sunni Arab states, began the air offensive against the Houthis to restore Hadi and his government to power.
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Allegations of abuses by the combatants surfaced from the earliest days of the conflict, establishing a pattern of fighting that has left about 5,000 people dead