NewsRescue
Yemen’s resilient Houthi’s have exchanged a Saudi soldier for 7 Yemeni prisoners in Saudi prisons as part of talks to allow aid into Yemen and reduce fighting at the border.
This follows reports that the Saudi regime has begun direct talks with a Houthi delegation in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Monday, according to a London-based newspaper Rai Al-Youm. The newspaper, which is edited by a prominent Palestinian journalist ‘Abdel-Bari ‘Atwan, said on Tuesday that both sides may continue negotiations next week.
The head of the UN special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed has informed the United Nations’ under-secretary general for political affairs Jeffrey Feltman of the talks, the daily said, noting that it had received a copy of the letter.
The Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud reportedly supervises the talks which have excluded the exiled Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, the report said. Hadi has resigned as president but Saudi Arabia continues to carry out airstrikes and ground assaults in Yemen in order to restore his authority. The Ansarullah has maintained that any talks must be held with the Saudis as their main adversary in the war, and not with Hadi.
It is important to note that the US and UK regimes are behind the Saudi-led coalition’s aggression against Yemen. Before the start of the aggression, Yemeni factions had reached agreement on power – sharing and the formation of a new government but the Saudis rejected that and launched a bloody war on Yemen. Since the beginning of the war, more than 8,000 Yemenis have been killed with more than 90% of them civilians that included close to 2000 children.
Today, the humanitarian situation of Yemen is catastrophic and the EU Parliament recently voted to impose an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia due to its war crimes in Yemen. The UN Chief also recently condemned the Saudi airstrikes on a market that killed more than 40 people.
Before now the Saudi Wahhabi regime has rejected direct talks with Ansarullah but the gross failure of its military campaign in Yemen, the successive defeats it suffered from the brave Yemeni Resistance and the huge cost of the war that is taken a huge toil on the Saudi economy has forced the Saudi regime to the negotiation table.
If the Saudi regime can negotiate now, why did this same regime not encourage negotiations from the beginning? Why is it negotiating now after it has killed 8000+ Yemeni civilians, destroyed the country’s infrastructures and destroyed important historical sites of Yemen? War and armed confrontation should not be the first option of settling conflicts and disagreements, that should be the last after repeated negotiations have failed but to the bloodthirsty Wahhabi savages everything is about killings and destructions.
We salute the bravery and courage of the Yemeni people in their quest to ride their country of US imperialism and Saudi domination. There is dignity in resistance and victory belong to the oppressed people of Yemen.
#FreeZakzaky
Harun Elbinawi
elbinawi@yahoo.com
Elbinawi.wordpress.com