RIYADH (Dispatches) – Saudi and Omani delegations are in Yemen’s capital Sana’a, media said on Sunday, to negotiate a permanent ceasefire deal with Yemeni government officials and end Riyadh’s military aggression against the country.
The visit indicates progress in the Oman-mediated consultations between Riyadh and Sana’a, which run in parallel to UN peace efforts. Peace efforts have also gained momentum after Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to reestablish ties in a deal brokered by China.
The envoys, who landed late on Saturday, were scheduled to meet with the head of Houthi Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashat, to hold talks on ending hostilities and lifting a Saudi-led “blockade” on Yemeni ports, SABA news agency reported.
Sources have told Reuters that the Saudi-Yemen talks are focused on a full reopening of ports and Sana’a airport, payment of wages for public servants, rebuilding efforts and a timeline for foreign forces to exit the country.
Earlier, Saudi Arabia freed more than a dozen Houthi detainees ahead of a wider prisoner release agreed upon by the warring sides, according to a spokesman for the Yemeni rebel group.
Abdul-Qader el-Murtaza, a Houthi official in charge of prisoner exchange talks in Yemen’s conflict, said on Twitter that 13 prisoners have arrived in Sana’a.
On Sunday, Yemeni media outlets published pictures of a Saudi official shaking hands with Houthi in Sana’a.
The outlets added that the faces of the high-ranking Saudi officials involved in the talks with Ansarullah officials have not been publicized at their request.
Local news agencies said Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Yemen Mohammed Saeed al-Jaber, who resides in the southern port city of Aden, arrived in Sana’a at the head of the Saudi delegation to meet with officials from the Ansarullah movement and the National Salvation Government, hours after the arrival of an Omani delegation.
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of Ansarullah’s political bureau told Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network late on Friday that “there is an understanding between Saudi Arabia and Yemen,” without going into details.
He said that the understandings, as well as initiatives for peaceful settlement of the Yemen crisis, will be announced in two phases: One before Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, and the other at another time.
“We support any proposals and efforts by Saudi Arabia or other parties to pacify the Yemeni crisis and reach a comprehensive political resolution of the conflict,” the senior Ansarullah official said.
Saudi Arabia launched the bloody war against Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with a number of its allies and with arms and logistics support from the U.S. and several Western states to reinstall Hadi, who resigned from the presidency in late 2014 and later fled to Riyadh amid a political conflict with the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.
The war objective was also to crush the Ansarullah movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of an effective government in Yemen.
However, it has stopped well shy of all of its goals, despite killing tens of thousands of Yemenis and turning the entire country into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.