Yemen’s warring parties agree largest prisoner swap

Yemen’s warring parties have agreed to exchange around 1,000 prisoners, including 15 Saudis, as part of trust-building steps aimed at reviving a stalled peace process, the United Nations and sources said on Sunday.
The Yemeni government, backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, and the Houthi movement they have been battling for over five years, in late 2018 signed a deal to swap some 15,000 detainees split between both sides but the pact has been slowly and only partially implemented.

The two sides will now free 1,081 detainees and prisoners, U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths said in a joint news briefing with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after a nearly 10-day meeting of the prisoners’ exchange committee held in the Swiss village of Glion above Lake Geneva.

Heads of the two sides of the committee hugged at the end of their meeting, with Griffiths telling them: “Well done, well done.”
Sources familiar with the talks and Houthi-run Masirah TV said the movement would release 400 people, including 15 Saudis and four Sudanese, while the coalition would free 681 Houthi fighters in the largest swap since peace talks in Stockholm in December 2018.

“I urge the parties to move forward immediately with the release and to spare no effort in building upon this momentum to swiftly agree to releasing more detainees,” Griffiths said.

ICRC Middle East director Fabrizio Carboni, sitting next to Griffiths, called on the two warring parties to provide “security and logistical guarantees” for swift releases. The ICRC team will interview those released and give them medical checks.