Zarif: Saudis turned down Iran's offers to facilitate political solution in Yemen
Saudi Arabia rejected Tehran's offers to facilitate a political solution to the crisis in Yemen, says Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
“At the beginning of the crisis in Yemen in 2013, I wrote a letter to former Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faysal with the aim of ending the crisis with the aid of Iran and Saudi Arabia. But they denied, saying that the Arab world's affairs do not concern Tehran,” said Zarif on Sunday during an interview with the BBC's Arabic language service.
Zarif noted that the Saudis' rejection was based on the false assumption that the war in Yemen would be ended soon.
Iran's foreign minister added that the finding a solution to the crisis was could only be achieved via dialogue and negotiations among Yemenis, and that Iran was always prepared to help solve the ongoing crisis in the impoverished country.
Meanwhile, at least 12 people, including women and children, have been killed in a Saudi airstrike in southern Yemen.
The civilians were killed as Saudi fighter jets targeted an area in the province of Ta’izz.
The deadly attack came after a series of airstrikes which left four people dead in the northwestern province of Sa’ada and in Hudaydah province, in the country’s west.
Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime.
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The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the Saudi-led war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured since March 2015.
The United Nations says a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.
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