This was stated after joint meeting of the foreign ministers of the six countries of the Gulf Co-operation Council with the US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jeddah.
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Kerry’s new peace road came after his meeting this week in Jeddah with foreign ministers of British and Arab Gulf states to end Yemen civil war.
Kerry lashed out at Iran, saying its arms shipments to the Shiite Huthi rebels in Yemen posed a threat to the United States. “It is a threat to the United States and it can not continue”. “The multilateral meeting on Yemen is created to share ideas and initiatives for getting the political discussions back on track and trying to get a political solution”, the official said.
The intention of forming a unity government has been an Al Houthi demand from early on, but further encouragement to Al Houthis to take the talks seriously was a GCC-US agreement that when the rebels disarm they can give their weapons to a neutral third party.
Also on 6 August, President Abdurabu Mansour Hadi of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, which the Saudi-led coalition is trying to restore in Sanaa, announced the start of a new offensive to capture Sanaa from Houthi forces. The Houthis, who are allied with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran, seized the capital, Sana, in 2014.
The civil war has been going on for almost two years and has brought more than 9,000 deaths, of whom 3,800 were civilians, as well as displaced three million people.
A report from the U.N. Human Rights Council released Thursday details a number of allegations of human rights abuses committed in Yemen over the past 18 months that have led to thousands of deaths and left millions of people without proper food.
The night before, Kerry met for three hours with Crown Prince and Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is also Saudi Arabia’s defense minister.
Air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition were suspected of causing around half of all civilian deaths, while attacks by groups affiliated with the rebels were blamed for around a quarter of the deaths, Thursday’s report said.
He also criticized the worldwide response to the crisis in Yemen and pledged $189 million in a new USA aid for the humanitarian crisis marring the country, considered the poorest in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia lobbied hard to weigh in on language included in a draft of the United Nations report before its release, and Yemen’s foreign minister recently traveled to Geneva to press the government’s case to diplomats.
Earlier, the Yemeni Saba news agency, controlled by Houthi rebels fighting Saudi Arabian-led forces in Yemen, cited “an unidentified military source” as saying a single missile was sacked into Saudi Arabia.
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“It is essential for Yemen, for countries in the region and for the world community in general to agree on a plan to end the fighting and achieve a lasting peace”, he said.
