An Iranian diplomat who served as ambassador to Yemen left the capital Sanaa held by the Houthi rebels on Saturday, a senior Saudi official told AFP, Riyadh controlling the airspace of this poor and war-torn country.
Read alsoAfter seven years of war, Yemen threatened with implosion
Close to Iran, the Houthi rebels have been fighting the Yemeni government forces for seven years, supported by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, Riyadh and Tehran being regional rivals who are opposed on several issues.
"
The ambassador left in an Iraqi plane and is probably now in Baghdad
", declared on condition of anonymity this senior Saudi official close to the Yemeni file.
The ambassador would have left at the request of the rebels
According to him, the departure of the ambassador intervened at the request of the rebels and with the approval of Riyadh, which authorized this flight after Iraqi and Omani mediation between the Houthis and the Saudis.
Neither the reasons nor the circumstances of this departure were specified by this source.
In Tehran, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said the ambassador had been infected with Covid for a few days and that the conditions were in place to transfer him to Iran, without further clarification.
Iran, the only country to have diplomatic relations with the Houthis, announced the dispatch of an ambassador to Sanaa in October 2020, without specifying when or how diplomat Hassan Eyrlou went there. of Yemen remaining under Saudi control.
In an article published Friday, the Wall Street Journal cites Saudi sources that the rebel demand is seen by Saudi officials "
as a sign of tensions between Tehran and the extremist movement
."
Since the capture of Sana'a by the rebels in 2014, Yemen has been torn by a devastating war, accentuated by the intervention a year later by the Saudi coalition.
Today is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
According to the UN, the war will have caused the death of 377,000 people by the end of 2021, more than half of them due to the indirect consequences of the conflict, such as lack of drinking water, hunger and disease.