He additionally met Omani Foreign Minister Alawi bin Abdullah before a meeting with other Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers from Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Kerry is in Saudi Arabia for talks to push for peace in Yemen after UN-brokered talks collapsed despite global concern over mounting civilian casualties.
Advertisement
US Secretary of State John Kerry has met with Saudi King Salman in the Red Sea city of Jiddah ahead of wider talks focusing on Yemen’s 18-month-long war and the conflict in Syria.
Kerry lashed out at Iran and said its arms shipments to the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen posed a threat to the US.
The attack also came as Saudi Arabia claimed that Iran, its regional rival, is supplying Houthis in Yemen with missiles.
The new push for peace will have “both a security and political track simultaneously working in order to provide a comprehensive settlement”, said Kerry, adding that Gulf states had “agreed unanimously with this new initiative”.
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.
Since a Saudi-led coalition of nine countries ramped up airstrikes in March 2015 against the Shiite rebels, who control the capital, Sanaa, 3,800 civilians have been killed, a new report from the UN Human Rights Council says.
Saudi Arabia accuses the Houthis of being an Iranian proxy, which the rebels deny.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: As Kerry was huddling with diplomats in the Saudi city of Jeddah, the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva was releasing another damning report about the conflict in Yemen. 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. In response, Houthis began shelling across the border into Saudi Arabia.
The UN high commissioner for human rights earlier called on the worldwide community to “refrain from encouraging or arming parties to the conflict”.
Advertisement
In Geneva, the United Nations human rights office said on Thursday that air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition are responsible for the largest part of the 3,799 civilians killed so far and it has committed other violations that may contravene worldwide law. That brings the total U.S. humanitarian aid package to Yemen to more than $327 million in fiscal year 2016, the State Department said. Human rights groups have argued that USA forces may also be responsible under the rules of war for civilian casualties because of its support for the Saudi campaign.
