Yemen blasts ‘malicious’ US role in thwarting peace efforts
The head of Yemen's Supreme Political Council has hit out at US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking for scuttling efforts to extend a UN-brokered truce, describing the truce situation in his country as a time bomb.
“We are in a no-peace, no-war state. While we had reached a good level of understanding during previous rounds of talks, the American envoy’s trip to the region thwarted those efforts,” Yemen’s official Saba news agency quoted Mahdi al-Mashat as saying in Sana’a on Monday.
“While the US envoy pretends to be a peace dove, he is rather an ill-omened owl,” al-Mashat said, referring to Lenderking’s journey to the region starting on October 11 to purportedly support the UN-led negotiations to extend truce in Yemen.
Mashat said “some aggressor countries” which benefit from the war in Yemen are pushing the country towards a “political and military explosion”, citing the US envoy’s “malicious role” in the failure of the peace talks.
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with its Arab allies and with arms and logistics support from the US and other Western states.
The objective was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the popular Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.
While the Saudi-led coalition has failed to meet any of its objectives, the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The UN-brokered truce between the Saudi-led coalition and Yemen first came into effect in April and has been extended twice since.
In mid-October Yemeni Foreign Minister Hisham Sharaf said there would be no talks about the extension of the six-month truce which expired on October 2 unless the nation’s legitimate demands were fully met.
He stressed that the Sana’a-based National Salvation Government spares no effort to establish just and dignified peace throughout the war-torn country.
