RIYADH (Dispatches) – After facing years of unrelenting resistance from the Yemeni Army and popular committee forces, Persian Gulf Arab countries are seeking to host rare talks between Yemen’s warring parties, officials said on Tuesday.
The Saudi-based Persian Gulf Cooperation Council “is considering holding talks between Yemen’s warring parties to put an end to the conflict”, an official from the six-nation bloc, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday.
An official from the Saudi-backed militant group, said the conference would take place between March 29 and April 7.
“We don’t have a problem if the Yemeni fighters attend the talks to try to find a solution to security, military and political issues,” the official told AFP.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies — including the UAE — launched a brutal war against Yemen in March 2015. The war was meant to eliminate Yemen’s popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstall a former regime. The conflict, accompanied by a tight siege, has failed to reach its goals, but has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people.
The Saudi-led coalition has been preventing fuel shipments from reaching Yemen while looting the impoverished nation’s resources.
The UN says more than 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger. The world body also refers to the situation in Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The Saudi war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories.
A member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council warned of attacks targeting “very sensitive” positions inside the United Arab Emirates in retaliation for a “deliberate” campaign to starve the Yemeni people, specifically through an ongoing siege imposed on Yemen by a Saudi-led military coalition.
Referring to the siege on Yemen, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi told Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network that there are “deliberate” attempts to starve the Yemeni people, which “the United Nations is covering it up.”
But “We will not stay idly by”, he added.
His remarks come as UN agencies warned on Monday that Yemen’s dire hunger crisis is “teetering on the edge of outright catastrophe”.
The senior official further stressed that the Yemeni forces can allow the ships to dock at Hudaydah port, but “these issues are awaiting instructions from the leadership.”
He did not rule out that “Dubai and Abu Dhabi would be in the crosshairs of” the Yemeni retaliatory attacks.
“We have the ability to hit very sensitive targets,” he said, adding that any related decision depends on the assessment made by the leader of the Ansarullah resistance movement, the head of the Supreme Political Council, and Yemen’s Defense Ministry.
Al-Houthi also said that “the U.S. is leading the aggression on Yemen.”
Elsewhere in his remarks, the official also stressed that “Israel must refrain from committing any harmful acts against the Yemeni people, otherwise very sensitive targets inside [the occupied territories] would be targeted.”
Earlier on Monday, Ansarullah Leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said the economic war waged on Yemen aims to “torture the Yemeni people and raise the level of their suffering.”