The Yemeni government yesterday said it has accepted a UN-proposed peace agreement to end more than a year of armed conflict, but there has been no word from the rebels.
The announcement by the Saudi-backed government came after a high-level meeting in Riyadh chaired by Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
“The meeting approved the draft agreement presented by the United Nations calling for an end to the armed conflict and the withdrawal [of rebels] from Sana’a ... and the cities of Taez and al-Hudaydah,” said a statement, cited by the Saba news agency.
Yemeni Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdulmalek al-Mikhlafi, who is leading negotiating team in Kuwait City, said he has sent a letter to the UN special envoy informing him the government backed the “Kuwait Agreement.”
However, one pre-condition is that the Iran-backed Houthis and forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh sign the deal by Sunday, al-Mikhlafi wrote on Twitter.
He said that the Yemeni leadership has authorized the delegation to sign the deal, which has received strong international and regional backing.
There has been no official reaction from the rebels.
However, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said on Twitter before the government announcement that the rebels insist on a comprehensive and complete solution, and rejected what he called “half solutions.”
Under the agreement, all decisions made by the rebels since they occupied the capital in September 2014 will be scrapped, al-Mikhlafi said.
The deal also abolishes the controversial supreme political council set up jointly by the Houthis and the General People’s Congress of former president Saleh on Thursday to run the country, he said.
A political dialogue between various Yemeni factions is to start 45 days after the rebels withdraw and hand over heavy weapons to a military committee to be formed by Hadi.
Prisoners of war would also be freed, as specified by the UN Security Council Resolution 2216, the agreement said.
The talks in Kuwait, which began on April 21, have so far made no major breakthrough.
UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed on Saturday managed to extend talks for a week after the government delegation said it was leaving, and submitted the peace deal draft to both sides.
The government approval also came hours after seven Saudi troops were killed in border clashes with Yemeni rebels.
More than 6,400 people have been killed in the Arabian Peninsula state since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in March last year in support of Hadi’s government.
Another 2.8 million people have been displaced and more than 80 percent of the population urgently needs humanitarian aid, according to UN figures.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.