DUBAI (Dispatches) – A solution in Yemen’s two and-a-half year-old war will likely come through military rather than political means, the country’s Saudi-backed president said.
Speaking in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi also told the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya channel that a plan to hand over control of the country’s main port to a neutral party remained blocked by the Houthi fighters and their ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
"The military solution is the more likely one for the Yemen crisis in light of the intransigence of the Houthi and Saleh coup militias,” Hadi said in the interview, according to a text provided by the Yemeni state-run Saba news agency.
"Despite that, the legitimate government continues to extend its hand for peace because it is responsible for the Yemeni people and for lifting the suffering from it,” he added.
In September 2014, the Ansarullah fighters took state matters in their hands in Sana’a amid the absence of an efficient government there.
Before gaining control of the capital, the Houthis had set a deadline for the political parties to put aside differences and fill the power vacuum, but the deadline was missed without any change in the impoverished country’s political scene.
However, the former Saudi-backed president, Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi, later stepped down, refusing a call by the Houthi movement to reconsider the move.
Hadi then fled to Saudi Arabia, which launched a military campaign against Yemen along with a number of its allies in March 2015 to reinstall Hadi and crush the Houthi movement.
More than 12,000 people have been killed since the onset of the Saudi military campaign more than two and a half years ago. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.