RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The opposing sides in Yemen’s civil war have agreed to a cease-fire in a port city that serves as a critical lifeline for humanitarian aid to the country, along with other measures that signaled rare diplomatic progress after more than four years of conflict, the United Nations secretary-general said Thursday.
“We are living the beginning of the end of one of the biggest tragedies of the 21st century,” Ant?nio Guterres told reporters.
Guterres spoke after a week of U.N.-brokered talks in Sweden between Yemen’s Saudi-backed government and a Yemeni rebel group known as the Houthis that the secretary-general said yielded agreement to halt the fighting in Hodeida, the port city, and its surrounding province, along with a prisoner swap that could free thousands.
The agreement comes amid growing international pressure to end the war, a conflict that has sparked what the United Nations deems the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and has become a proxy battle between U.S.-backed Arab nations and Iran, which supports the Houthis.
The conflict began in late 2014, after the Houthis ousted the Yemeni government from the capital, Sanaa, and intensified months later when a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia intervened in support of the internationally recognized government.
Previous cease-fire agreements have collapsed quickly. But there has been greater international pressure on the warring sides in recent months to de-escalate the fighting, in part because of warnings by relief agencies that more than 16 million people in Yemen — more than half of the country’s population — are facing faminelike conditions.
More than 60,000 people, combatants and civilians, have been killed in the conflict since 2016, according to an estimate by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
Guterres warned that achieving peace between the warring parties would be a “lengthy and complex” process, but he noted, “The agreement of today is a demonstration that they are serious in moving with all the obstacles, with all the difficulties.”
Saudi Arabia, the principal backer of the Yemeni government, has faced mounting calls to resolve the war, including from the United States.
