SANAA —
Yemen’s Houthi rebels announced a three-day truce with the Saudi-led coalition and dangled the prospect of a “permanent” ceasefire on Saturday, the seventh anniversary of a brutal conflict that has left millions on the brink of famine.
اضافة اعلان
A day after a wave of Houthi drone and missile
attacks on Saudi targets, including an oil plant that turned into an inferno
near the
Formula One race in Jeddah, political leader Mahdi Al-Mashat put rebel
operations on hold.
As thousands of people marched in the rebel-held
capital, Sanaa, to mark the anniversary, Mashat appeared on TV to announce the
“suspension of missile and drone strikes and all military actions for a period
of three days”.
“And we are ready to turn this declaration into a
final and permanent commitment in the event that
Saudi Arabia commits to ending
the siege and stopping its raids on Yemen once and for all,” he said.
There was no immediate response from Saudi Arabia,
which retaliated to Friday’s attacks by launching air strikes against the
Iran-backed rebels in Sanaa and Hodeida, and destroying four explosives-laden
boats.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Saturday condemned the
rebel strikes and reprisals by the Saudi-led coalition, calling on “all parties
to exercise maximum restraint” and “urgently reach a negotiated settlement to
end the conflict”.
Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country even before
the war, has been teetering on the brink of catastrophe for years as the
complex conflict rages on multiple fronts.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed,
directly or indirectly, and millions have been displaced in what the
UN calls
the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
‘Peace will come’
Mashat said the Houthis are ready to “release all coalition
prisoners, including (president Abdrabbuh Mansur) Hadi’s brother, militia
prisoners, and other nationalities in exchange for the full release of all our
prisoners”.
“The Saudi regime
must prove its seriousness ... by responding to a ceasefire, lifting the siege,
and expelling foreign forces from our country.”
“And then peace will come and then it will be time
to talk about political solutions in a calm atmosphere away from any military
or humanitarian pressure.”
The Tehran-backed rebels’ surprise move came exactly
seven years after the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention to support
Yemen’s government, after the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014.
After months of negotiations, Iran is near to
reviving a stalled deal with international partners where it will curb its
nuclear ambitions in return for an easing of sanctions.
When it first intervened in Yemen on March 26, 2015,
the Saudi-led coalition was made up of nine countries.
Today, it is largely just Saudi Arabia and, to a
lesser extent, the UAE, which says it has withdrawn troops from Yemen but
remains an influential partner.
The coalition’s intervention has stopped the Houthis’
advances in the south and east of the country but has been unable to push them
out of the north, including the capital Sanaa.
“Militarily, the war is now at stalemate,”
Elisabeth Kendall, a researcher at Oxford University, told AFP this week, adding that
Saudi Arabia “may at this point be keen to extract itself” from Yemen.
“But it needs to be able to position any withdrawal as a win
and to ensure that it is not left with a Houthi-controlled enemy state on its
southern border,” she said.
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