Dubai: The UAE, a key player in the coalition battling Ansar Allah in Yemen, on Monday warned the insurgents to withdraw unconditionally from the flashpoint port city of Hodeida, after UN peace efforts fizzled.
“There can be no conditions in any offers to withdraw,” the United Arab Emirates’ Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told a press conference in Dubai.
“If the Ansar Allah wanted to set conditions, they should have thought of that a year ago... Now is not the time to negotiate.”
Ansar Allah have controlled Hodeida, a key entry point for desperately-needed aid, since 2014, when they drove the government out of the capital Sanaa and seized large swathes of the country.
Neighbouring Saudi Arabia and its allies — chief among them US-trained UAE troops — intervened in the conflict on the government’s side the following year, sparking what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The alliance last week launched a major operation to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, triggering fears of a fresh humanitarian crisis in a country already on the brink of famine.
Gargash’s statement came hours before the UN’s top Yemen envoy, Martin Griffiths, was due to brief the Security Council on his efforts to end the crisis over Hodeida, whose port handles over 70 per cent of Yemen’s imports.
Gargash said the Saudi and UAE-led offensive aimed “to help the UN envoy in his last chance to convince the Ansar Allah to withdraw unconditionally from the city and avoid any confrontation.”
Griffiths held two days of talks with the Ansar Allah over the weekend in Sanaa, but they rejected a ceasefire under current conditions.
The head of their unofficial government, Abdulaziz Saleh bin Habtoor, accused Saudi-led forces of “escalating their attacks on the western coast when they felt there were serious moves towards a solution”.
Gargash said on Monday that his country and its allies aimed to “avoid civilian casualties”, adding that the operation was “going very well”. Civilians deaths have not yet been confirmed in Hodeida.
Four UAE troops have died in the operation, according to state media, while medical and military sources say at least 164 mostly Ansar Allah fighters have died.
The UAE’s Gargash said the Arab coalition had kept the Hodeida-Sanaa road “open for the Ansar Allah militias to withdraw”.
The UAE minister denied reports that French troops had been helping the coalition to take Hodeida, but said France had offered to remove mines when it becomes necessary.
The Saudi and Emirati-backed assault has displaced thousands of families as loyalist forces battle towards the Red Sea port city.
Rights groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been forced to suspend operations in the area.
Since 2015, the war for control of the Arab world’s poorest country has killed at least 10,000 people and triggered what the UN says is the world’s largest single humanitarian crisis.
Some 22 million people are now in need of aid in Yemen, with 8.4 million on the brink of starvation.
— AFP
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
