First plane leaves Sanaa for Saudi amid Amman talks

Sanaa [Yemen], June 19: The first commercial flight from Yemen's rebel-held capital to Saudi Arabia since 2016 took off carrying hajj pilgrims on Saturday, in the latest sign of easing tensions after years of war. A Yemenia Airways plane carrying 277 travelers departed at around 8 pm (1700 GMT), an official told AFP, seven years after Sanaa's international airport was blockaded by the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. "Hopefully, the blockade will end and the airport will remain open.
We are very happy and relieved, and I cannot describe the feeling," said Mohammad Askar, one of the travelers. The Jeddah-bound flight is the first to Saudi Arabia since Sanaa's airport was closed by the coalition blockade in August 2016, more than a year into the Saudi-led military campaign to dislodge the Houthis. Air traffic was largely halted by the blockade, but there have been exemptions for aid flights that are a lifeline for the population. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the fighting in Yemen or from indirect causes such as lack of food or water, in what the United Nations calls one of the world's biggest humanitarian crises.
But despite coalition bombing raids and ground clashes, the Houthis, who seized control of Sanaa in 2014, ousting the internationally recognized government, rule over large swathes of the country. Two more flights will depart on Monday and Tuesday, officials said. The Houthis' Works Minister GhalebMutlaq said about 200 flights would be needed to accommodate the 24,000 people that he said wanted to travel. "We consider what is happening today as a good gesture, so that airports, especially Sanaa airport, will be opened to Yemeni travelers," Najeeb Al-Aji, the Houthis' minister of guidance, hajj and umrah, told journalists.
Thousands of pilgrims in Houthi-held areas travel by bus to Saudi Arabia, or to government-controlled Aden - an arduous 12-hour journey, due to checkpoints - where they can fly to the neighboring country. "We can no longer bear the burdens and hardships of travelling to Aden," said Akram Mohamed Murshid, one of the pilgrims boarding the plane. Meanwhile, Yemen's government and Houthi rebels are locked in talks in Jordan to set the ground for a possible prisoner exchange, a Red Cross official told AFP on Sunday.
The negotiations since Friday in the Jordanian capital Amman are overseen by the office of the UN special envoy to Yemen and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said Jessica Moussan, ICRC's media adviser for the Middle East. They are meeting "together with. parties to the conflict in Yemen to address issues pertaining to negotiations on a future release operation", she told AFP. On Friday, the UN envoy's office said the Amman talks were a follow-up to an agreement stuck by the two sides in Stockholm five years ago. The deal called for the "release all prisoners, detainees, missing persons, arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared persons, and those under house arrest", held in connection with Yemen's nearly decade-long conflict, "without any exceptions or conditions".
Moussan said the ICRC was engaged with both sides to secure a prisoner swap in line with a deal agreed in Switzerland in March. Fighting in Yemen sharply declined after a UN-brokered truce came into effect in April last year, and full-scale hostilities did not resume even when the ceasefire lapsed in October. Among the terms of the truce was a resumption in international flights from Sanaa. The first commercial flight in six years took off for Jordan's capital Amman in May last year.
Peace efforts have accelerated since March when Saudi Arabia, seeking to calm the region as it tries to revamp its oil-reliant economy and attract investment, announced a surprise rapprochement with its powerful rival Iran, seven years after they broke off ties. After Iran reopened its embassy in Riyadh earlier this month, on Saturday Saudi Arabia's foreign minister visited Tehran, where he held talks with his opposite number. A Saudi delegation flew to Sanaa in April, the same week as a major prisoner swap that freed nearly 900 detainees in a confidence-building measure.
However, the Saudi and Houthi negotiators failed to agree on a new truce and later Saudi ambassador Mohammed Al-Jaber, while stressing both sides were "serious" about the process, told AFP that the next steps were unclear. "We are all aware that the road to peace is going to be long and difficult," UN special envoy Hans Grundberg said at a forum in The Hague last week, noting "an uptick in public rhetoric threatening large-scale escalation". - AFP
Source: Kuwait Times