Yemen Peace Talk

Yemen's Houthi rebels could free a political leader with ties to the internationally recognised government who has been detained for nearly a decade, under a preliminary prisoner swap deal announced by the United Nations on Monday. Mohamed Qahtan is the leader of the Sunni Islamist Islah party, which is aligned with the Saudi Arabia-backed government, and he has been held incommunicado by the Iranian-backed Houthis since 2015, the United Nations said. The office of UN special envoy Hans Grundberg convened a meeting in Oman with the International Committee of the Red Cross over the weekend to facilitate talks centred on a prisoner exchange, in accordance with the 2018 Stockholm Agreement, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The two Yemeni sides agreed to meet to discuss the final list of who will be released and the details of Qahtan's release, Dujarric said, without providing details on the potential agreement. Qahtan's release has been a point of contention for years, Dujarric ..

The senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken had spoken recently to McGurk and Burns about the talks

Threats to return to war in Yemen are hindering efforts to start peace talks as the Arab world's poorest country faces an increasingly dire economic situation, a senior U.N. official said Wednesday. Hans Grundberg, the U.N. special representative for Yemen, told the Security Council that hostilities between Houthi rebels and government forces haven't returned to levels before a six-month truce that ended in October, but he said intermittent fighting and exchanges of fire have continued. He singled out six front-line areas. They include Yemen's third-largest city, Taiz, which has been under siege by the Houthis since 2016; Hodeida, where Yemen's main port is located; and the oil-rich eastern province of Marib, which the Houthis attempted to seize in 2021. Yemen's civil war erupted in 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthis swept down from their northern stronghold and chased the internationally recognized government from the capital, Sanaa. A Saudi-led coalition intervened the following ye

During 2022, several rounds of negotiations between Yemen's government and the Houthis, which were held under the auspices of the UN, brought a fragile cease-fire for several months

The UN plan provides the withdrawal of Houthis from Sanaa, as well as the Yemeni provinces of Taiz and Al Hudaydah