After more than a month of Yemen peace consultations that are taking place in Kuwait, the Houthi- Saleh rebel delegation dropped a new bombshell by retracting their recognition of all the bases of the consultations, particularly the UN resolution 2216, which has led to the collapse of all agreements and understandings. In addition to this, this move has caused the government delegation to suspend its participation without withdrawing from or exiting the consultations.

The head of the government delegation who is also the Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdul-Malik Al-Mekhlafi said that “After a month of consultations in Kuwait, the rebels are breaking up the consultations and their foundations by not accepting the bases and fundamentals of the talks and most importantly, legitimacy”. Al-Mekhlafi added that he has requested UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed “not to allow the rebels to waste more time, and that he re-establish dialogue with them and compel them to oblige to the bases on which the consultations were established before they are resumed”.

Sources close to the consultations told Asharq Al-Awsat that a member of the rebel delegation Hamza Al-Houthi announced yesterday that “they do not recognise legitimacy and that they will only recognise rule that is compatible to their requests”. The head of the rebel delegation Mohamed Abdel Salam supported the ideas proposed by Al-Houthi in response to a question by Ould Cheikh, and this led Ould Cheikh to comment that “In this way you are destroying the consultations”.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services Senator John McCain said that “had it not been for the intervention of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the situation would have become bad”. He also expressed his appreciation of the efforts made by Riyadh, under the leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz, to support legitimacy in Yemen and to protect the Yemeni people from Houthi militias which overturned legitimacy and seized state institutions.