A prisoner exchange involving hundreds of detainees from Yemen’s brutal civil war is to start today, a Yemeni government official said, against a backdrop of rising hopes for peace.
Nearly 900 prisoners, most of whom were fighting with Houthi rebels, are to be flown between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which leads the military coalition fighting on behalf of the ousted government, the official said on Tuesday.
The Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country has been at war since the Saudi Arabian-led intervention began in March 2015, months after the Iran-backed Houthis seized the capital Sana’a.
Photo: Saba News Agency via Reuters
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, through direct and indirect causes, and Yemen is experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the UN said.
The prisoner exchange, the biggest since October 2020, would last three days and involve multiple cities in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, said Majid Fadael, the official spokesman for the government delegation negotiating the exchange.
The Houthis are to release 181 prisoners, including Saudi Arabians and Sudanese, in exchange for 706 detainees held by government forces, according to an agreement reached last month in Switzerland.
“All arrangements have been completed ... to implement the agreed-upon exchange process,” Fadael wrote on Twitter.
“The first day of the exchange process will be through reciprocal flights of the Red Cross between Aden-Sanaa and Sanaa-Aden,” he added.
Jessica Moussan, public affairs and media relations adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that “our teams are on the ground working to facilitate the safe transfer and repatriation of detainees.”
“We are hoping that the upcoming detainee release operation in Yemen will take place in the next few days. However, considering the complexity of such operation, we are not in a position to confirm any specific dates as the situation continues to evolve,” she said.
The exchange agreement was struck days after the landmark announcement that heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Iran, long at odds in the turbulent Gulf region, would seek to restore diplomatic ties after a seven-year hiatus.
Yemen’s six-month, UN-brokered truce that officially lapsed in October last year is still largely holding, providing respite for a population of 30 million that is mostly dependent on aid.
This week, a Saudi Arabian delegation has held discussions with the Houthi leadership in Sana’a, hoping to “stabilize” the truce and seeking inter-Yemeni dialogue toward a “comprehensive political solution,” the Saudi Arabian ambassador said.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Tuesday spoke with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and “welcomed Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary efforts to pursue a more comprehensive roadmap for ending the war and offered full US support for those efforts,” the White House said in a statement.
Analysts say that oil-rich Saudi Arabia wants to exit the war in neighboring Yemen to focus on domestic projects aimed at diversifying its crude-dependent economy.
After today’s flights between rebel-held Sana’a and Aden, tomorrow and Saturday prisoners would be flown in and out of Riyadh and Abha in Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Sana’a, Mocha and Marib, Fadael said.
“This exchange process will be followed by other exchanges in the near future until all detainees and abductees are released on the basis of all for all, and all detention centres and prisons are cleared,” he wrote on Twitter.
Thirteen prisoners on Saturday last week arrived at Sana’a International Airport, in exchange for a Saudi Arabian prisoner who was released earlier, the Houthis said.
“More than 1,050” prisoners were released in the last major exchange in October 2020, the ICRC said.
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ political council, said that the talks with the Saudi Arabian delegation “now revolve around lifting the [transportation] blockade completely, withdrawing all foreign forces in Yemen, and releasing all prisoners.”
“What we care about now is the issue of achieving comprehensive peace,” he said in an interview.
However, on Twitter he also wrote about the possibility of “the return of war ... in a more fierce manner” if negotiations fail.
“Saudi aircraft will bomb Yemen again, and the Yemeni air and missile forces will resume bombing Saudi Arabia,” al-Bukhaiti wrote.
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