14 killed in a car crash in war-torn Yemen, state media report

SANAA, Yemen — A passenger bus overturned while driving Sunday in a mountainous area in southwestern Yemen, killing at least 14 people, state-run media reported.

The vehicle was traveling on a highway overlooking a rocky area in the Maqatra district when it suffered a mechanical failure and tumbled to the ground, according to the state-run SABA news agency.

The bus was transporting 14 passengers from the southern province of Aden, the seat of the internationally recognized government, to the southwestern province of Taiz, the agency reported.

It said only one person survived the crash and was taken to hospital for treatment.

Deadly traffic crashes are not uncommon in Yemen, where a decade of civil war wrecked the country’s infrastructure. The crashes claim thousands of lives every year and are mostly caused by speeding, bad roads, or poor enforcement of traffic laws.

Yemen plunged into civil war in 2014, when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels took control of the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.

A Saudi-led coalition entered the war in March 2015, backed at the time by the U.S., in an effort to restore the internationally recognized government to power.

The war has killed more than 150,000 people including civilians and combatants. In recent years the situation has deteriorated and the conflict has largely turned into a stalemate and caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.