Iran Urges Full Stop in Saudi Attacks on Yemen

A senior Iranian official has urged a complete stop in Saudi Arabia’s ongoing military campaign against Yemen, once again criticizing the aggression against the impoverished Arab country.

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who is Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, said on Thursday that the Islamic Republic has repeatedly expressed its disapproval of military action since the outset of crisis in Yemen.

“Tehran will continue its efforts for encouraging genuine and effective Yemeni-Yemeni dialogue,” he said in a phone conversation with Ismail OuldCheikh Ahmed, the UN special envoy for Yemen.

Ould announced on Monday that the warring sides in Yemen have agreed to attend talks in Switzerland on December 15.

The UN official also said that both Yemen’s Ansarullah movement and the fugitive former president Abd Rabbuah Mansour Hadi, whom Saudi Arabia seeks to reinstate through a deadly air campaign on Yemenis, have agreed to halt the fighting and establish a humanitarian ceasefire concurrent with the talks.

During the phone conversation, Amir-Abdollahian also gave a positive assessment of the UN initiative to host peace talks on the ongoing conflict in Yemen.

For his part, the UN envoy hailed Iran’s role in helping the political settlement of the Yemeni crisis, calling on all sides involved in the conflict to contribute further to finding a solution to deadly conflict in the country.

Yemen has been under the crippling Saudi air and sea blockade since Riyadh started its attacks on March 26.

Yemeni monitoring groups say the aggression has killed more than 7,500 people with most of them civilians while the UN puts the death toll at 6,000, saying around 1,000 women and children have been killed as a result of the attacks.

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