SNA’A (Dispatches) – A flight carrying Yemen’s Ansarullah fighters who were held as prisoners of war arrived in Yemen’s capital Sana’a, as Saudi prisoners were also released later in the day, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.
The flights on Saturday are part of a large-scale, multiday exchange involving nearly 900 detainees that came amid peace talks that have raised hopes for an end to the eight-year-old Saudi-led war on Yemen.
“The release operations are the result of talks concluded on March 20, 2023 in Bern, Switzerland, where the parties to the conflict in Yemen finalized the plan for the release. The ICRC co-chaired these meetings with the Office of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen,” the ICRC said.
Fabrizio Carboni, the ICRC’s regional director for the Near and Middle East, noted, “With this act of goodwill, hundreds of families torn apart by conflict are being reunited during the holy month of Ramadan, a glimmer of hope amidst great suffering.”
“Our deep desire is that these releases provide momentum for a broader political solution, leading to even more detainees returning to their loved ones,” he added.
On Friday, 318 prisoners were transported on four flights between Aden and the capital, Sana’a, reuniting with their families before next week’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
The operation is the most significant prisoner exchange in Yemen since the Saudi-led coalition and their Ansarullah movement released over 1,000 detainees in October 2020. The Red Cross announced that 318 detainees were released on Friday.
The leader of the Ansarullah movement, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, congratulated the liberated prisoners and their families on their release. He assured the families of the remaining prisoners that the work would continue until the liberation of all prisoners is complete.
The exchange of prisoners between Sana’a and Riyadh comes after an agreement reached between the parties to the Yemeni conflict in the Swiss capital Bern last March.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it will use its planes to transport detainees by air to and from six cities in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
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 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.