ADEN (Dispatches) – Yemen’s warring parties started fresh UN-sponsored talks in Jordan on Monday, Yemeni officials said, two days after Houthi Ansarullah forces began withdrawing from the ports of Hudaydah, breaking a six month stalemate.
The talks will focus on sharing out revenues from Hudaydah’s three Red Sea ports to help relieve an urgent humanitarian crisis, they said.
The Houthi group began on Saturday a pullout from the ports of Saleef, Ras Isa and Hudaydah, handing them over to UN-supervised local forces as agreed under a pact with the Saudi-backed former regime last December that had stalled for months.
"The UN and its special envoy are sponsoring talks in Amman ... to discuss the issue of salaries and to make the economic situation neutral,” Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthis’ Supreme Revolutionary Committee, said in a tweet.
A UN official said the office of UN envoy Martin Griffiths was facilitating the meeting.
The United Nations said on Sunday that the withdrawal of Houthi forces from the three key ports in Yemen is proceeding "in accordance with established plans” for a second day, as the Saud-backed former government still refuses to pull out its besieging forces from Hudaydah in line with an accord the two sides reached in Sweden last year.
Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement is in control of the ports which have been under a tight siege by the country’s former Saudi-backed government, led by ex-president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, since June last year.
In December 2018, representatives from the Houthi Ansarullah movement and the Riyadh-sponsored government of Hadi reached the truce deal during UN-mediated peace talks in Sweden.
Leading a coalition of its allies, Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall Hadi, who had resigned amid popular discontent and fled to Riyadh, and to crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which has been significantly helping the Yemeni army against a Saudi-led military coalition for the past four years.
The imposed war initially consisted of an aerial campaign, but was later coupled with a naval blockade and the deployment of ground mercenaries to Yemen. Furthermore, armed militia forces loyal to Hadi, in line with invaders, launch frequent attacks against Yemeni people in regions held by Houthis.
The aggression is estimated to have left 56,000 Yemenis dead.
Late in April, Iran dismissed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claims of Tehran’s negative role in the implementation of a ceasefire deal between Yemen’s warring sides in the port city of Hudaydah, saying Washington’s "blame game” is meant to cover up the Saudi-Emirati crimes in the war-torn country.

Members of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement are seen during withdrawal from Salif port in Hudaydah province, Yemen, May 11, 2019.