CAIRO (Dispatches) – Yemen’s Ansarullah said it had postponed the release of around 100 prisoners belonging to the former Saudi-backed regime after it had previously been announced to take place on Saturday.
The head of the Ansarullah Prisoner Affairs Committee, Abdul Qader al-Murtada, said on X that the delay was caused by “technical reasons”.
Al-Murtada said on Friday that the group would release more than 100 prisoners in “a unilateral humanitarian initiative”.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies launched the war on Yemen to restore power to the impoverished country’s Western- and Riyadh-allied government.
The war has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Yemenis and turned the entire country into the site of what the United Nations has described as the one of world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The Western governments further extended their political and logistical support to Riyadh in their failed bid to restore power in Yemen to the former Saudi-installed government.
The former Yemeni government’s president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, resigned in late 2014 and later fled to Riyadh amid a political conflict with Ansarullah. The movement has been running Yemen’s affairs in the absence of a functioning administration.
The war further led to the killing of tens of thousands of Yemenis and turned the entire nation into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.