Local Editor
Yemen’s warring parties are expected to announce a humanitarian ceasefire within days before U.N.-sponsored talks to end a civil war that has killed nearly 6,000 people, an official from fugitive former President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government said on Monday.
The United Nations special envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, has met Hadi in Aden and Ansarullah officials in the Omani capital Muscat with a proposed agenda for the talks, which Hadi’s foreign minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi said would start on December 15.
"The Houthis have approved the agenda blueprint," an official in Hadi’s office told Reuters. "Within days a humanitarian ceasefire will be declared and steps to free prisoners and lifting the siege on the cities would begin."
For his part, the Ansarullah spokesman, in a posting on his Facebook page, confirmed that his group had discussed "the venue and the date for the talks planned for the middle of this month" with the U.N. envoy.
"Ways for a ceasefire and subsequent confidence-building steps were also discussed, and we expressed our openness to conduct a responsible and serious dialogue," the spokesman, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, added, without providing details.
Previous U.N.-mediated negotiations to end the conflict through dialogue failed as battles rage across the country and Saudi-led coalition warplanes bomb residential areas.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
