On Wednesday, a Yemeni Airlines plane transported dozens of passengers from Sanaa to Cairo on the first commercial flight between the two capitals since 2016, as part of the truce in the war-wracked country, which ends on Thursday.
The media office of the UN envoy to Yemen told AFP that 77 people boarded the plane that took off in the morning from the airport, which has been closed to commercial flights for nearly six years, while the agency’s photographer reported that journalists were not allowed to enter the airport.
This is the seventh commercial flight departing from the capital, Sanaa, since the start of the armistice on the second of last April. The other six flights were between Sanaa and Amman in Jordan, mostly carrying Yemeni patients.
The conflict in Yemen has been raging since 2014 between the Houthis, who control Sanaa and other areas in the north and west of the country, and government forces backed by a Saudi-led military coalition. The conflict has killed more than 377,000 people directly or as a result of the war’s repercussions, according to the United Nations.
The Iran-backed Houthis accuse Riyadh of imposing a “siege” on Yemen, especially by closing the airport to operating flights since 2016, while the Saudis say they want to prevent arms smuggling to the rebels.
Under the armistice agreement, two commercial flights from Sanaa were supposed to be allowed per week, but disputes over passport sources reduced the number of these flights, which represented a rare glimmer of hope in the conflict following a devastating war.
As the truce is nearing completion, Washington warned Tuesday of “difficulties” facing talks regarding extending it.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that talks aimed at extending the effects of the ceasefire “are not over yet, but it appears that they are facing some difficulties.”
In a statement to reporters, she indicated that her country considers the talks to reach an impasse as a problem, saying, “I encourage the parties on both sides to continue these efforts and to find a peaceful way to provide humanitarian aid to the Yemeni people.”
During the truce period, the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels accused each other of violating the ceasefire, and the agreement was not fully implemented, especially with regard to lifting the rebel siege of Taiz, but it did succeed in reducing violence levels significantly.
Relief organizations operating in Yemen had called on the parties to the conflict on Tuesday to extend the truce, at a time when the rebels and the government expressed no objection, but without reaching an actual agreement on that.
The organizations, numbering more than thirty, including the “Norwegian Refugee Council”, said in a statement, “We saw the positive humanitarian effects of the truce. In the first month of the truce alone, the number of dead or wounded in Yemen decreased by more than 50 percent, and due to the regular entry of fuel ships to the port of Hodeidah, people did not return They stand in queues.”