Houthis say will only join talks if Riyadh stops airstrikes
Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement says it is ready to attend the upcoming UN-sponsored Geneva talks on the Yemeni crisis only if the Saudi regime stops its military offensive on the impoverished Arab country.
Considering the ongoing Saudi airstrikes on the Yemeni people, we cannot accept to sit down at the negotiating table, said Ansarullah spokesman Mohamed Abdel-Salam in an interview with al-Mayadeen news channel on Thursday.
He also criticized Reyad Yassin Abdulla, the former foreign minister in the cabinet of Yemen’s fugitive president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, for urging Houthi fighters to lay down arms and leave the areas under their control as preconditions for the Geneva talks.
The Ansarullah movement will not yield to pressure to disarm its fighters and abandon the Yemeni cities as such moves will only pave the way for the “carnage” of people, Abdel-Salam went on to say.
He further touched upon the retaliatory attacks against Saudi Arabia, saying Yemenis only target military positions on the Saudi soil, while Riyadh’s military is intentionally massacring civilians in the neighboring state.
The Houthi revolutionaries will defend Yemen’s dignity with all might in the face of the Saudi military aggression, Abdel-Salam added.
Earlier in the day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that peace talks aimed at ending the crisis in Yemen will begin in the Swiss city of Geneva on May 28.
Riyadh started military aggression against Yemen on March 26 - without a UN mandate - in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which currently controls the capital, Sana’a, and other major provinces, and also to restore power to Hadi, who is a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The United Nations says, since March 19, over 1,800 people have been killed and 7,330 injured due to the conflict in Yemen.
In a televised speech on May 20, the leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, said talks are the “only solution” to the conflict in his country.
He also condemned the “brutal and barbarous aggression” by Saudi Arabia against Yemen and called it a crime targeting the infrastructures of the country.
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