Senior Saudi Military Commander Killed in Yemen

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — The Saudi-led coalition supporting Yemen’s internationally recognized government says a planned truce with the country’s Shiite rebels has been postponed for 12 hours.

Sultan al-Ketbi, an military officer from the United Arab Emirates…

In the latest Saudi attacks on Yemen, almost 20 civilians were killed across the embattled country on Sunday.

According to the United Nations, the war in Yemen has killed at least 5,884 people since March, when the fighting escalated after the Saudi-led coalition began launching airstrikes targeting the rebels.

The peace talks are “the only way to end the suffering of the Yemeni people”, the U.N. Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said last week.

Previous UN efforts have failed to narrow differences, and past ceasefires were broken.

The Shiite Houthis control the majority of the country’s northern regions and felt marginalized by Hadi’s Sunni government.

In March, Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies began an extensive air campaign aimed at reversing Houthi military gains in Yemen and restoring Hadi’s embattled government.

The government’s delegation is led by Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi while Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdel Salam, will head his committee in the talks.

Fierce fighting between the rebels and pro-Hadi forces continued on Monday in the southern Daleh province, witnesses said. The official Saudi and Emirati news agencies did not specify how they were killed.

The UN invited Hadi’s government and the Houthis to peace talks in Switzerland starting on Tuesday, after the sides agreed on a draft agenda and ground rules for the talks.

And there has been no word from Saleh or his General People’s Congress party, which is represented at the Switzerland talks.

The resolution calls for complete withdrawal of rebel forces from all the areas they control, in addition to surrendering arms captured in months of fighting.

On the same day, Yemen’s Houthi-linked Al-Maseera television channel reported that Houthi militiamen had successfully carried out a missile attack on Jizan International Airport in Saudi Arabia’s western city of Jizan.

Militants also have a growing presence in Aden, where IS fighters last week claimed responsibility for a December 6 blast that killed the governor of the southern province along with several of his bodyguards.

Yemen is the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest nation and an estimated 80 percent of its population of 26 million need aid.