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By Associated press
SANAA, Yemen – A senior Shia security official in Yemen said on Monday that the group would stop firing rockets into Saudi Arabia in an effort to bolster peace efforts, responding to a key Saudi demand in the first half of the year. Public sign of hope of the last attempt to stop bloodshed and civil suffering in the poorest country of the Arab world.
Over the past three years, a Saudi-led, Saudi-led coalition has launched a war against rebels known as the Houthis to bring back the internationally recognized Yemeni government. The rebels say they have been excluded from this government and have taken the power to rectify historical grievances against the central government.
Rebel leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said in a statement to reporters that Iran-backed rebels had ordered the cessation of rocket and drone firing on the Saudis and forces loyal to a member of the rebels. the coalition, the United Arab Emirates, at the request of the UN special envoy Martin Griffiths.
"We are ready to freeze and stop military operations on all fronts in order to achieve peace," said al-Houthi, citing rockets as part of a longer statement in which he accused states United States to be the main called "aggression" against Yemen.
The civil war in Yemen began after the uprising of the Arab Spring. The Houthis invaded their stronghold in the north of the country and took the capital, Sanaa, in 2014, with the help of troops loyal to Yemen's former strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The government fled the following year and Saudi Arabia, fearing that its arch-nemesis, Iran, is using Shiite tendencies of revolt to penetrate the Arabian Peninsula, has begun to launch air strikes against the rebels.
Riyadh formed a coalition of Sunni Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, and Sudan, and launched ground-breaking assaults on several fronts, without however taking control of the capital. . After major setbacks, he began outsourcing the field to local forces, including a group formed by the United Arab Emirates in the south.
The latest offensive led by Saudi Arabia, which began last summer, focused on the capture of the main port city of Hodeida, under rebel control, through which almost any Yemen's food and humanitarian aid that has desperately flowed were routed.
Griffiths, the US envoy, announced Friday that the two sides agreed to attend "soon" talks in Sweden to end the conflict. His announcement follows an informal de-escalation last week around Hodeida, although fighting continues on the ground in other areas.
It was not immediately to what extent the Houthis who tried to prevent missile fire in the kingdom would end the violence as a whole.
The truces rarely hold out entirely in Yemen 's disorderly civil war, where fighting is taking place on many fronts and attempts at peace talks abroad have repeatedly failed.
About 10,000 people have been killed in the war so far and two-thirds of Yemen's 27 million people depend on aid. More than 8 million people are at risk of starvation in what has become the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
