SANAA: The leader of Yemen’s northern rebels announced Saturday a cease-fire with government forces, and said he accepted the government’s terms for a cease-fire.
“In order to avoid ... the annihilation of civilians we reiterate our acceptance of the five points” for a cease-fire, Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi said in an audio recording posted on the Internet.
Government conditions include a rebel withdrawal, the removal of rebel checkpoints and clarification of the fate of kidnapped foreigners. The rebels must also return captured military and civilian equipment and refrain from intervening in local authority affairs.
Houthi said the rebels had launched three previous initiatives to end the conflict but had been rebuffed by the government.
Yemen is under international pressure to end the conflict quickly to free up resources to confront a separate threat from Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in the country.
The latest round of fighting broke out Aug. 11, when the military launched “Operation Scorched Earth,” an all-out assault against the rebels. Saudi Arabia was forced to join the fighting on Nov. 4, a day after the rebels killed a Saudi border guard and occupied two villages inside Saudi territory. The rebels announced Jan. 25 that they had withdrawn from Saudi land. The Kingdom said they had been driven out.
The Yemeni government offered the rebels the conditional cease-fire in September.
The UN refugee agency said Friday fighting in northern Yemen was spreading and that the five-year conflict had driven 250,000 people from their homes, deepening a humanitarian crisis. The number of displaced in the country has doubled since August when the latest round of fighting between the government and the rebels erupted, it said. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in Geneva the fighting has moved gradually from Saada city to the northwest, while more people were fleeing the province because they could not sustain themselves.
About 12,000 of the displaced have sought shelter in the capital Sanaa.
Meanwhile, Yemeni forces on Saturday captured an Al-Qaeda militant wearing an explosive belt who was planning a suicide attack on “economic facilities,” a government official said.
The man was detained while driving a motorbike in the Khalf area in the Hadramaut region, the Ministry of Interior official said in a statement. He was identified as Saleh Abdul-Habib Saleh Shawash.
“The primary interrogation of this terrorist (revealed) he was planning a suicide attack against economic facilities in Hadramaut ... the interrogation is ongoing to reveal more information about this and to see who else might be involved in the plan,” a ministry source said.
Yemen has gained a reputation as a haven and a training and recruiting center for Al-Qaeda militants since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. Authorities stepped up operations against the group after its Yemeni wing said it was behind an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound US airliner on Dec. 25.
