SANAA, Yemen -- U.N.-sponsored talks between Yemeni political parties and Shiite rebels who occupy the capital broke down Sunday, with several main factions calling for renewed protests against the rebels.
The failure extended a power vacuum in the leaderless country, home to what Washington considers al-Qaida's most dangerous offshoot, after the president resigned last week while rebels surrounded his house and demanded concessions.
An official of a party present at Sunday's meeting said the Islamist Islah party pulled out of the talks along with the Socialist and Nasserite parties. The official said the group rejected dialogue with the rebels, known as Houthis, and called for peaceful protests against them.
The parties demand the release of a group of 11 activists and journalists the Houthis detained earlier in the day during protests against them in Sanaa.
The Houthis, who control the streets of the capital in the absence of significant central government forces, had scuffled with the demonstrators, firing automatic rifles into the air to disperse the crowd and breaking journalists' cameras.
Three demonstrators were wounded and two others were beaten by armed Houthis wearing the uniforms of government security forces, protester Ali Ahmed Abdullah said by phone.
At another anti-rebel protest Sunday in the capital, some 200 demonstrators gathered in Change Square and marched toward the presidential palace. The square was the birthplace of Yemen's 2011 uprising against longtime autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh.
By nightfall, the streets were clear and the city silent. Just a day earlier, tens of thousands of people marched across the country to denounce the rebels, mainly adherents of a Shiite sect who swept down from their northern strongholds last summer.
The rebels control several cities and say they are fighting corruption and want a greater share of power, including more influence over the writing of a new constitution.
Earlier, state news agency SABA reported that parliament had postponed a meeting which had been scheduled for Sunday to decide whether to accept the resignation of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who quit as president Thursday along with his Cabinet.
"Members aren't allowed in, and no one will attend," Yehia al-Mathari, a member of parliament, said by telephone.
"Al-Sayyid will decide what happens next," he continued, referring to Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, the leader of the rebels.
Hadi remains at his private residence, surrounded by Houthi forces who run checkpoints across the capital and patrol the streets in pickups mounted with machine guns.
Houthis also surrounded the headquarters building of the country's air force Sunday, the officials added, preventing its top officer from entering.
Elsewhere in Sanaa, a car bomb exploded, injuring five people, including one seriously, security officials said.
Meanwhile, officials with the office of U.N. envoy Jamal Benomar said he is continuing his efforts to forge an agreement between the different Yemeni political forces.
All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information otherwise.
The tumult engulfing the country has extended to the southern port city of Aden, where non-Houthi militias clashed with government forces who recently announced they are no longer taking orders from the central government. One of the security personnel members was killed, said Brigadier Mohammed Musaed, a member of the security committee in Aden.
Also on Sunday, President Barack Obama defended his counterterrorism strategy in Yemen, saying efforts to root out a dangerous al-Qaida affiliate there would not be affected by the political vacuum in the country.
Yemen is home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The group has been linked to numerous failed attacks on the U.S. and claimed responsibility for the attack on a Paris satirical newspaper this month.
Obama has relied heavily on drone strikes to take out terror targets in Yemen. There were 23 U.S. drone strikes last year and 23 the year before, according to Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes based on local media reports.
Obama has held up that approach as a model for the military mission against the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq and Syria, which relies on airstrikes instead of U.S. ground troops.
Obama, who is traveling in India, said that approach "is not neat and it is not simple, but it is the best option we have."
"The alternative would be massive U.S. deployments in perpetuity, which would create its own blowback and cause probably more problems than it would potentially solve," Obama said during a joint media appearance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The U.S. military also has trained elite counterterrorism units of Yemen's military that have battled al-Qaida.
The president said that while he was concerned about the fragility of Yemen's central government, the country "has never been a perfect democracy or an island of stability."
The instability in Yemen has raised concerns among some lawmakers about Obama's broader anti-terror strategy. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told CBS' Face the Nation that more special operations forces may be needed in countries battling extremists.
McCain, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the administration of being "delusional" in thinking that its strategy in the Middle East was working and said Iran was "on the march." The Shiite rebels are believed to be backed by Iran, though they deny having any support from the Islamic republic.
"We need more boots on the ground," said McCain. "I know that's a tough thing to say, and a tough thing for Americans to swallow. But it doesn't mean the 82nd Airborne. It means forward air controllers. It means special forces, it means intelligence, and it means other capabilities."
Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she agreed that more special operations forces are necessary. She also said the U.S. needs more human intelligence in the region instead of relying so heavily on intelligence gathered by technical means.
Feinstein said that while Americans "don't want another war," she believes it is time "to look more deeply and broadly into what we're doing and how we're going it." She said the U.S. must also do more to protect U.S. partners in the region, including Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Information for this article was contributed by Ahmed al-Haj, Julie Pace and Anne Flaherty of The Associated Press; by Mohammed Hatem, Donna Abu-Nasr and Glen Carey of Bloomberg News; and by Mona el-Naggar of The New York Times.
A Section on 01/26/2015